


A Matter of Heart and Mind

by deansmultitudes



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Anger born of worry, Angst, Canon Divergent, Canon Universe, Could be interpreted as Major Character Death, Dean POV, Discussion Of Brain Damage, Discussion Of Medical Procedures And Brain Surgery, Gory Imagery, Impact Injuries, Injections, M/M, Nightmares, Pain, Post-Season/Series 08, Potentially Lethal Sickness, Seizures, Symptoms Similar To Brain Tumor, vomiting from pain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-26
Updated: 2020-11-26
Packaged: 2021-03-09 17:42:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 32,109
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27720203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deansmultitudes/pseuds/deansmultitudes
Summary: Cut off from Heaven after closing the Gates, Castiel becomes human. But to Dean, he also becomes something else—something Dean couldn’t admit to himself until now: the love of his life. The feelings are reciprocated and, for a while, things are good.Until the headaches begin.In true Winchester fashion, Cas pretends he’s fine until he can pretend no more. In true Dean fashion, Dean’s worried. Because the headaches might be something more than a migraine. Whether it’s a human sickness or something of a more angelic nature, they have to figure it out before Cas’s time runs out.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 58
Kudos: 101
Collections: DCBB 2020, The Destiel Fan Survey Favs Collection





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story was written for Dean/Cas Big Bang 2020
> 
> Thanks to my fantastic artist Usarechan! Check out the awesome fanart [here](https://usarechan.tumblr.com/post/635821542398394368/art-for-a-matter-of-heart-and-mind-by) and don't forget to leave some praise. No seriously, how awesome are those???
> 
> Huge huge huuuuuge thanks to my amazing beta fpwoper. You know I wouldn't manage this without you. Thank you for your patience ~~and sorry for the rewrites~~
> 
> And thanks to the best bro tco who supported me through this fic at the time of its inception. Ilysm
> 
> I hope you enjoy it!

“The heart thing is just freakin’ creepy,” Dean says, unable to take his eyes off the muscle pulsing in its own bloody juices. A plastic bag, instead of a more eco- and possibly heart-friendly paper, was a good idea. Cas wouldn’t want to re-enter Heaven with bloodstains on his white shirt.

Cas takes mercy on Dean and, with a quick turn of his wrist, he hides the heart in the pocket of his coat. He doesn’t seem amused by Dean’s repulsion. But then, how could he be amused by anything in this moment? He’s going back to Heaven, to the bunch of dicks that is his family. And God knows if he’s ever coming back again.

“As long as the remnants of the Nephil’s grace keep it pumping, the spell will work. Should work,” he corrects. They’ve been over this.

Kevin’s read of the Heaven tablet sounded solid. What Metatron called trials turning out to be a sneaky spell—and a double edged sword at that, which is what worries Dean most. It can lock the angels in, it can cast them out, as well. But Dean would trust Cas with his life; he trusts him with locking the gates of Heaven as well. He just has to shut it with the angels on the right side of the door.

Dean nods, half-heartedly, so to speak. He’s glad to have the thing out of his sight. So that he can keep Cas solely in his focus. While he can.

The night is cold and the rush of anxiety and excitement that warmed him up when the earth quaked as Hell swallowed each of its bastard children has now washed away, leaving only a knot in the pit of his stomach. It doesn’t feel like a victory at all.

For just a second Dean dares to take his eyes off Cas to peek through the rolled up window into the back seat of the car. Sam’s sleeping soundly, thin and gray, but breathing. He nearly missed the spectacle that aired all across the globe in salutation of his bravery, already half asleep in Dean’s arms. His eyes were closed but his mouth was curled up in a smile when the thunder rolled and the shrieks of condemned followed.

He won. They won.

Now, Sam’ll miss this all over again, the dicks upstairs being locked where they belong. But it doesn’t matter, as long as the world is safe once again.

Cas is still there when Dean’s eyes turn to him, the very same spot where they left him. Just a few feet away, standing straight, the wind playing with his overcoat.

“Okay,” Dean says again, same word, different meaning.

He searches for the blue of Cas’s eyes, but it’s too dark to make out the color. The intensity of Cas’s stare on Dean’s face is all the same. He can sense them, though, just like the first time they met, only warmer. He’s not the same angel anymore, not that warrior of God who dragged Dean’s ass out of Hell and threatened to throw him back in. That cold marble statue is now nearly human, all soft edges and sympathy and free will. How he’ll ever fit back in the Heavenly ranks, Dean has no idea. But he must, he will somehow.

Or maybe he won’t, maybe he’ll get executed for treason and sabotage. Angels were never too forgiving.

Dean won’t know either way. He’ll keep on doing his thing, hoping Cas is alive and well, somewhere up there, maybe watching over him, like he promised once in that motel room. He’ll keep fighting down here, thinking about Cas. Missing Cas.

This time it’s Cas who nods, then turns his eyes skyward. Ready.

“Cas, wait!” Dean calls, a blow of air so sudden it nearly tears his throat up. His hand shoots forward and his heart rate does, too, as, for a fraction of second, he’s not entirely sure if Cas is still there or if he’s already gone forever with one flap of his wings and no goodbye.

But Cas is there, eyes on Dean again, expectant. His face caught in the silver light.

Dean’s had a few hours to process the fact he has to let Cas go. Ever since Cas broke the news to him, in this same spot, at the driveway of a run-down church, Dean’s been trying to make his peace with the idea of Cas being gone for good. They had a good time, they shared a beer, scoured the world for a bunch of ingredients for the Heaven-closing spell, they witnessed the balance being restored. They tied up the loose ends, most of them at least, and Dean was ready to say goodbye.

But he’s no longer ready now.

“Cas, I—”

The rest of the words get stuck in his throat. He opens his mouth and tries again, but he chokes on them instead. They’re not that difficult words to say—he can’t say them nonetheless. Even though Cas is walking away, for the first time and the last time he’s walking away for good. And Dean can’t even say those three words to him, so overdue.

“I have to go, now, Dean,” Cas reminds him, his voice rough, his grace patrolling for the closeness of other angels who might crash on their party any second.

“I—” Dean tries one last time and fails.

Maybe it’s not the fault of his mouth or his throat or his lungs, but of his naive, stubborn heart that won’t believe Cas can ever go away forever. That’s a preposterous thought, even now, at the very edge of farewell, it just doesn’t make sense. Even dead, Cas would always come back somehow.

And so Dean lets those three words get stuck where they are, untold and safe, and shoots forward, instead, before his mind can see through his plan and protest. It’s easier, somehow, to act instead of talking. There’s more danger in words than in the fist tugging at the lapels of the coat, than in the press of lips against lips. There’s no danger at all when those lips come to life, just as demanding, when there’s a hold on the small of Dean’s back, thigh pressing against his thigh.

The air is warm again, like Dean’s skin is on fire, and the chasing angels and the closure of Heaven and the goodbye all cease to matter. Just for a heartbeat, two, three.

“I have to go,” Cas whispers against Dean’s mouth and pulls away.

He’s gone. The ruffle of his wings lost in the blow of the wind. Dean’s all alone before he can even open his eyes. His lips still buzz with the rush of blood in them, his heart races his breath. Not even a goodbye. But that’s fine. That moment was enough.

Dean doesn’t move, he doesn’t dare. His limbs feel frozen in the wind, so cold once again in the absence of warmth. But it’s not the cold that stills him in place. It’s that stubborn, naive part of him that says Cas’ll come back. So Dean waits.

At first it’s just a pulse, passing through the sky, from where he’s standing, out, like circles on a pond’s surface. It’s a barely-there thing, more a sensation than anything else. It flows across the sky’s underbelly, beneath the stars, and past the horizon.

Dean keeps his face turned up, his eyes never leave the spot where the wave began. That must be where Cas is standing, right above him, dusting his hands off after the ritual. An ache begins to settle in his neck by the time the impulse rounds the earth and meets on the other side. And when it does, it resonates in his bones as his ears fill with the voices of the angels.

Unlike demons, angels don’t lament when they go back home. Or, at least, Dean doesn’t think they do, if he can judge by the sound that reverberates throughout the universe—more akin to a song than a cacophony. It’s understandable, Heaven is a little bit better a place to spend an eternity in than Hell.

They get sucked back into Heaven one by one in the white pillars of light. There are too many of them to count in just this small slice of sky. How many were there of them, walking the earth since they first descended all those years ago, as the followers of Michael, then followers of Raphael, then of no one at all?

“Good luck covering that up, CIA,” Dean mutters to no one, as the white stripes burn their image into his retinas.

The show of lights ends the same way that it began, only in reverse, and when the circle closes above, Dean’s heart sinks to his knees. Heaven is shut and sealed and he’s here. And Cas is gone.

A roar, like a passing jet plane, thunders behind Dean, ends in a crash. The blow throws him off his feet straight into the Impala’s side. He lands on it so hard, he might just have made a dent—either in the car or in his ribs.

Always fucking something, he thinks, forcing the air back to his lungs. They just can’t catch a minute of break. He peels himself off the metal and glass that’s only by some miracle left untouched. The night is quiet once again.

Dean’s passing glance meets Sam’s through the window. He’s hardly awake, even if his eyes are wide open, frantically searching for the source of the ruckus that stirred him awake.

_ I got this _ , Dean gestures to him. The kid’s too weak for this shit anyway, whatever it is: an alien spaceship that crash landed at the site or just another armageddon they jump-started meaning well.

Dean turns, one hand on a blade at his side, the other holding onto the roof for balance. There’s nothing. No giant hole in the ground, no U-no-more-FO, nothing but the run-down road, a piece of grass, the lake.

“What the hell?”

He ignores the trembling of his hands as he struggles with the flashlight app on his phone, silently thanking Sam for installing it. The stream of light lands at his feet, combs the ground as he moves slowly forward.

A moan reaches Dean’s ears before his light reaches the shape lying in the grass. It’s a few dozen feet away from the car and half as far away from him. It’s human-sized, moving just slightly and piercing through the darkness with its bright overalls.

Dean runs. Before he can assess the danger, he runs, nearly drops his phone, reaches the man splayed out in the mud. He reaches Cas.

“Cas! Can you hear me? Cas! Are you okay? You— you’re here.”

He can hardly believe his own words as he says them. The legs of his jeans soak through in an instant as he kneels by Cas’s side. He’s pounded a good few inches into the soil, face-down, hands thrown overhead, legs spread out like he’s making a snow angel. There’s blood. Not as much of it as could be expected, but his right sleeve has more red on it than beige.

Dean’s chest tightens at the view. His hands fly to Cas’s back, his arms, his head. He doesn’t know where to start, how to move him not to hurt him further, how many of his bones are shattered.

Cas groans, attempting to raise his head, pull his face out of the mud. His fingers dig in to find support.

“Alright, I got you, I got you.”

Dean grabs him by the shoulder, gently first, anticipating any sign of pain, then harder. He guides his other shoulder to avoid a sprain, and tugs him upwards until he can get a solid hold around his chest. With a lot of pained groans, but luckily no actual screams, he gets Cas to sit up, offering himself as a support.

He’s all covered with a layer of mud: his clothes, his face, his tie. Slowly, so slowly, Cas raises his hand to wipe it off his eyes and Dean pulls out a handkerchief to aid him. He makes gentle passes across his lashes, uncovering smears of blood on his skin.

Cas is quiet. Once his moans die down, he doesn’t say a word. When his eyelids are free of soil, he opens his eyes and closes them again to let Dean work. The more mud Dean wipes away, the heavier his breathing becomes. It’s irrational, he knows, but the feeling that has crept up his spine won’t let go. A feeling that the person he’ll uncover won’t be Cas after all. That it won’t be his face, not his body, just his clothes wrapped around someone else.

Then a thought much worse comes to Dean’s mind and his hand stops working mid-movement at the bottom lip. A thought that it’s the right face and the right body, but not the right entity stuffed inside it. Not Cas, just his vessel, ejected from Heaven once it has served its purpose and is not needed anymore, left to live his life in peace. The vessel, the guy—Jimmy. Jimmy Novak.

“Cas?” The word comes out soundless. Dean clears his throat and tries once again. “Cas? Is— is it you, Cas?” He keeps saying his name like it could drag the angel down and push him back into the vessel. He can’t ignore the quiver of his lips as he changes his tune, but loses the letters on the way out. “Ji— Jim-”

Cas—or not Cas—the man pulls a face at him, half a smile, half a grimace, and it tells Dean nothing. He has to wait for the guy to turn away and spit out the mud that filled his mouth.

“Dean,” the guy says, still bent over, and suddenly everything’s right. The timbre of his voice, the similar ease and force with which he says the word. The word—the name.

Dean lets out a heavy sigh, expels all the stale, held up air. He tightens his embrace just to make sure Cas is here and not just an illusion.

“Oh, shit,” he mutters to himself, trying to gather his thoughts because he wants to say too many things at once, including the thing he couldn’t say before—but with that one, he won’t even try again. “Oh, shit.”

“Nice to see you, too, Dean,” Cas mutters eventually, sitting back up. Grains of soil still between his teeth, to which Dean pulls a sympathetic grimace.

As Dean resumes cleaning Cas’s face, he ends up starting with the first thing that appears on his tongue before he can bite it. “Should’ve closed your mouth.”

Cas shoots him a stare so foul Dean’s sure it can kill. “Of course, next time I fall from a few hundred miles, I’ll remember to keep my mouth shut.”

“Right,” Dean murmurs, pocketing the rag devoid of a single clean thread in it. Cas’s face is still smeared all over with dirt and blood, but he can’t do anything about it. “So, what the hell happened?”

Cas tips his head, all the way to one shoulder, then to the other. Slow, at first, he flexes the muscles in his arms, as if he hasn’t moved them in months. Not until he gets to rolling his shoulders, stretching his back, as if he was checking on his wings too, does he answer.

“I fell.”

His face is expressionless, his tone perfectly matter-of-fact. He keeps stretching his body like they’re not talking about a life-changing event here. Like he’s not still stuck nearly waist-deep in mud.

“That I figured,” Dean replies. “Didn’t have to be so literal about it.”

Cas raises an eyebrow. “You think? I didn’t expect that. Although, I wasn’t sure I’d even manage to escape the spell, the pull was strong.”

“I saw what it did to the other guys.”

“Exactly. So I plummeted and lost balance and—” He raises and drops his hand to visualise the situation.

Falling. Dean knows what that means: to the wings and the halo. “So now you’re— You’re not… an angel anymore?”

“I am. For now, at least,” Cas replies.

“For now?”

“I’m cut off from the host and I’ve just strained my grace to heal my vessel,” Cas explains impatiently. “Once what’s left of it drains, I become human, practically.”

He sounds so stoic about it, but something in his choice of words strikes an old, rusted chord in Dean, a memory of a road ahead in the middle of a world much different than this and the voice uttering them that much more broken.

“So like the Apocalypse?”

“Like the Apocalypse,” Cas confirms. “Only much quicker.”

“Sorry.” Dean doesn’t want to think about it now, what this change will do to Cas. He just got Cas back, though he thought he’d never see him again. And they’re both freezing, soaked in rainwater. “Can you get up?”

Cas nods, decidedly, and Dean helps him climb to his feet. They both struggle a little on the slippery ground, but manage at last. Cas leans heavily on Dean’s shoulder, at first, like he’s not sure his legs will support him, but by the time they reach the Impala, Cas is walking confidently on his own.

“Can you, uh—” Dean begins as Cas reaches for the handle to the passenger seat.

The man raises his eyes to him, questioningly.

“Could you take off your coat?” Dean says, feeling like a total asshole. The guy just took one for the team, fell from fuck knows how high, probably broke all of his bones and this is what Dean’s worried about—a bit of mud soaking into the Impala’s upholstery. “It’s all dirty.”

Cas sends him a glance much dirtier than his clothes, but shrugs his coat off, turns it inside out and folds it.

“Thanks.”

That’s just a distraction—isn’t it?—from the real problem staining the victorious atmosphere. It was supposed to be a goodbye; no consequences, no awkward drives to the motel room that they’ll now have to share. Dean was never going to have to—get to—look Cas in the eye, only carry the memory of his lips with him.

But Dean’s got Cas back now, and it shouldn’t feel this heavy; at the bottom of his lungs, like the air isn’t reaching all the way there. Little mistakes never weigh this much.

It’d better not be too late to take it all back.

“Hey, so, about that thing earlier…” he trails off, eyes fixed on Cas’s face, trying to read it across the darkness.

There is no revulsion on it, so that’s a relief. There’s no smile, either, though how could Dean expect it? He’d rather have Cas say those words, any words, in fact. But instead he’s just standing there, staring over the roof of the Impala, waiting. As if Dean was only breaking out the details of their next hunt, instead of trying this hard not to break things between them.

“I shouldn’t have. It was just—” he says, his face burning to the top of his ears. What the hell was he thinking? That he can explain himself or why, when he looks at Cas, safe and here, all he wants is to do it again, mud and all? “Just forget it, okay?”

For just a moment, the night seems to go darker, Cas’s face blurs into one with it. Then he shifts away, reaching for the handle.

He’s no longer looking at Dean, when he says, “Forget what?”


	2. Chapter 2

On his tiptoes, Dean slips into the bedroom in a narrow stripe of light from the corridor. He walks over to Cas’s side of bed. With a flip of a switch, the darkness dissipates in a halo of light from the nightstand and stays away from Cas’s face, now illuminated in a warm shade of orange.

Cas lies sprawled out on his back, with one hand tucked under his pillow, the other reaching across the bed like Dean has never left it. His face is calm, features relaxed without so much as a wrinkle in his brow. Where the shadow plays on his lips, a hint of a smile seems to be playing with it. Dean’s palm stops mid-way to the dark strands of hair that fell over Cas’s forehead to rest their tips on his lashes. He indulges in the blissful image for a few seconds more before disturbing it with a quick brush of his fingers that sweeps the bangs away from Cas’s face.

A miniscule twitch tenses the muscles around Cas’s eyes and before it can settle in. Dean leans down to press his lips to Cas’s forehead, his fingers still entangled in his soft locks.

“Wakey, wakey,” Dean singsongs, pulling away just far enough to watch Cas’s face change.

Cas’s head shifts against Dean’s palm that slipped down, fingers caressing his temple, cupping his stubbly cheek. His nose wrinkles in annoyance, his bottom lip puffs out under Dean’s thumb. His mouth makes a grumpy noise like he’s about to ask for five minutes more before school and turn away from the intruder interrupting his dreams.

But then his eyes flutter open, gradually, blinking the sand away and Dean’s face, hanging low over his, comes into focus. His face brightens once more, with a full-blown smile this time, and Dean answers with a smile of his own.

“Good morning, Cas.”

“Mornin’,” Cas mumbles, but instead of getting up, he snuggles his face into a pillow and closes his eyes.

Dean rolls his eyes and gives Cas a little poke on his shoulder. “Get up, Cas, breakfast is almost ready.” And when that doesn’t happen, he adds, “Don’t make me tickle you.”

There’s another sound coming from Cas, followed by an irritated “okay,” which is satisfactory enough and Dean exits the room, leaving Cas to stew a little in his drowsiness until he’s cooked and ready to join him in the kitchen.

Dean enjoys the calm of the Bunker just before it comes to life. The quiet only disturbed by the hum of a laptop, the air filled with the fragrance of the brewing coffee and when his mood is really, though unexplainably, good—as it is today—the smell of oil and pancakes.

As per usual, it’s Sam who joins him first, already showered and dressed, although the hour’s hardly humane. He smiles widely at the sight of pancakes and hoards the first portion for himself. Flooding his plate in maple syrup is probably the only act of dietary self-indulgence Dean has ever seen him committing. Guess pancakes don’t taste so well with no fat salad dressing.

“Is it a hunt?” Sam asks between the bites, pointing to the screen on the counter. The obnoxiously loud letters in the title of the article on the first page couldn’t spell out hunt more clearly even if they exchanged the ‘blood-drained victims’ for ‘vampire dining grounds’.

“Yup,” Dean mutters in response, grabbing for two random cups and setting them next to the coffeemaker. “We’re leaving as soon as Cas is ready.”

Cas is a real sleepyhead. When Dean put Cas to bed the first night after he fell completely, he expected him to not be able to fall asleep for hours and jump awake as soon as he did, scared by a nightmare as vivid as the waking world. But it took tired Cas ten minutes of steady breathing in the darkness of his own room to drift away. Dean spent the whole night watchful, listening in for terrified screams coming from the room on the opposite side of the corridor to his. Nothing came, Cas slept the whole night through and didn’t wake until Dean knocked at his door.

It went on for every night since then. Cas’s sleep was deep and seemingly calm most of the time. Sometimes, in the middle of a REM phase Cas would wiggle and kick and purr out some inexplicable words that might have as well been dead languages, but Dean didn’t find out about this until they exchanged their separate beds for the one standing in Dean’s room. He would press his palm to Cas’s bare shoulder, caress it with soothing strokes, until the bad dream went away and Cas’s breathing calmed, his body relaxed. Dean would then wrap his arm around Cas’s body and close the space between them. Cas never woke up at night.

Dean goes on to pushing the cups and glasses back and forth in the cabinet in search of Cas’s cup, but to no avail. Next, he checks on the dish rack and, finally, he catches a glimpse of the white wing-shaped handle in the sink under the tower of plates. In a stubborn yet impressive round of Jenga, he manages to pull the cup out without breaking everything else and cleans it. He’s certainly not gonna be the one who deals with the rest of this mess.

The pancake on the verge of overdone sizzles for attention. He sets the cup down with a clank and nearly burns his hand trying to get the pancake out of the pan quickly. The steps coming from the hallway announce Cas’s arrival and Dean’s lips curl up in an involuntary smile.

“Finally!” Dean cheers, lifting two plates up like a seasoned waiter, as he hears Cas’s sleepy grunt by the door. The guy’s got impeccable timing, Dean’s gotta give him that. “Guess who’s the best boyfriend ever?”

“Casanova,” Cas says drily, taking his seat, still in his pajamas. Dean narrows his eyes at him, seriously considering withholding the plate until Cas corrects himself. But then, Cas does, with a shiteating grin on his gace. “Mine is pretty great, though.”

“Better,” Dean says, ignoring Sam’s snort over by the coffee pot.

Cas accepts the plate and the coffee with gratitude. He dives right in, without care for the temperature. He keeps devouring the pancakes as Dean fills him in on the gross details on the hunt. It’s good to have someone in the house who truly appreciates Dean’s cooking.

“—and the witness’s description? Huge, burly guy with one eye in the middle of his forehead.”

Cas looks at Dean. “Like cyclopes?”

“Like cyclopes,” Dean echoes. “I never liked that douche Summers.”

Even the confused squint on Cas’s face and a lecture from Sam about “No, Dean, Cyclops as in Odyssey blah blah” can’t ruin Dean’s pride in that joke.

“Didn’t the headlines say something about blood-drained victims, though?” Sam interjects halfway through his own rant.

“Well, maybe they’re not cyclopes,” Dean says, pursing his lips. “Something like a mix of the two? Vampire-cyclopes—”

“Don’t say it—”

“—vamplopes.”

Sam lets out a long-suffering sigh while Dean flashes his shiteating grin at him.

“You know, I always thought the cyclopes were too harshly judged,” Cas says, completely ignoring Dean’s brilliance. Absent-mindedly, his finger caresses the wing-shaped handle of his cup, rhythmically moving down all the way to where it meets the table and back up to the warm rim. “Polyphemus was quite a nice man, although he was never the same after what Odysseus did to him.”

The motion is almost hypnotising. Cas’s tale slips in through one ear and out the other and Dean barely registers that Cas just implied he knew the guy who knew the literal Odysseus of Ithaca. Dean’s for sure gonna want to hear more about it later, but now he can’t help marvelling about Cas’s silly little tic. He’s only been human for a few months, yet he’s developed a habit he might not even be aware of.

A part of Dean can’t wait to see what else Cas will pick up, what else he might yet become.

The mug itself was such a terrible idea. Dean didn’t think its meaning through when he stumbled upon it in the archives. The general bunker inventory had been Sam’s idea, yet somehow Dean and Cas ended up down there alone. The box was full of porcelain dishes, but the cup stood out. It just screamed “Cas” to Dean, the whole angelic thing.

He pulled it out, blew over it to take most of the gray layer off and pushed it into Cas’s hands with a grin.

“Hey, you can have at least one wing now.”

Only after Cas’s face fell did Dean realize what an insensitive asshole he was being. Wing jokes, however innocent, would probably never leave the ‘too soon’ zone for a fallen angel. Be it a month or a lifetime later.

There was barely any grace left inside Cas, then, his jaw covered with a dark stubble Cas was yet to learn to shave off.

“Shit, sorry, Cas, I didn’t mean to—” he started rambling, feeling his heart tumble around his stomach.

But to Dean’s surprise, Cas smiled gently and thanked him. Even though the smile never reached his eyes, Dean sighed in relief. Cas’s palms turned black from rubbing the surface of the cup clean.

“I love it,” Cas said, setting the cup aside in the safety of a shelf.

Just a minute later, the cup would take on a whole new meaning for them, with the dust from it painting a dark smudge across Cas’s temple. They’d be covered in dust by the end of that afternoon anyway, yet Dean couldn’t stop himself from pulling a clean rag out of his pocket to wipe it off.

This time, closing the distance was not a mistake. It was a choice, playful, smile on both their faces-choice. Right there, between the dusted rows of boxes in the basement, they kissed. Of course, it had to take them so long to kiss again—after that night, after Dean’s words. This time it was for real; not hastily, not desperate, not a spur of a moment thing they could try to brush off again and go on with their lives like nothing happened. Like Dean hasn’t kissed his best friend, again, like there was nothing out of the ordinary about that. It’s also miraculous that Cas still wanted it after Dean’s stupid words.

This time they kissed just like that, because they both wanted to, because they both felt it. How long had it been there? That want, that desire to touch, to kiss, to belong with Cas? Dean couldn’t tell, or wouldn’t, though if he was being honest with himself, in that very moment when Cas’s lips parted for him, Dean could not ignore the slightest pang of regret that he hadn’t allowed himself to do this sooner. They had had all this time together that they wasted.

Dean’s not sure whether Cas so adamantly swears by the cup because of that kiss or just ‘cause he really does like it. Maybe both—Dean never asked him about it, but Cas refuses to drink any warm beverages from anything else.

“Dean!” Sam’s voice almost makes Dean jump in his seat. “Are you even listening?”

“Of course, I’m listening,” Dean lies, offended at the accusation. “We’re kicking a cyclops’s ass.”

“Uh-huh.” Sam pulls a bitchface at Dean, as he gets up, taking his empty plate with him. “It’s a five hour drive, so I’m gonna go start packing. Meet you two by the car if you’re ever done.”

Dean doesn’t appreciate Sam’s tone, but the chill, hardly half-eaten pancakes on his own plate seem to be keeping Sam’s side, there. In his defense, Cas still isn’t done eating, either.

“Who’s Summers?” Cas asks, as soon as Sam is gone, probably not very eager to repeat himself. His fork keeps splitting the last pancake into smaller and smaller syrup-soaked bits.

“He’s the worst X-Men.”

“Did he give up one eye to see the future but only received the curse of foreseeing his own death?”

Dean narrows his eyes at Cas. Whatever the hell is that supposed to mean? But just in case it had something to do with Cas’s lecture Dean totally did not wholly miss, it’s better to go along with it.

“That’s not how X-Men work, dude,” Dean says, between too big bites of his pancake. “He only shoots lasers from his eyes. And he so doesn’t deserve Jean Grey.”

“The, um, crazy powerful mind-mending redhead chick?” Cas says slowly—or rather echoes what sounds like Dean’s own words back at him.

“Damn right,” Dean says, biting his tongue before he adds ‘and hot’ to that. He gets up with his empty plate, but holds back, reaching for Cas’s plate. “Just leave it if you don’t want it.”

Cas looks sadly at the pancake before pushing the plate into Dean’s hand. “They were very tasty, I just—”

“It’s usually what happens when you go in too hard,” Dean jokes, taking the world’s grossest puzzle game to the trash. “Learned it the hard way.” He sets the plates by the sink not to risk the present tower toppling over. Maybe he should capitulate and wash them quickly before they leave so they don’t come back to their bunker having new habitants if the hunt takes longer. “So, Odysseus, huh? How cool was he? Did you meet him? I have to know everything.”

He keeps rambling on while he searches for the sponge, until the lack of answer—or a sound—from Cas becomes concerning. He turns around to find Cas hunched over the table, his head in his hands.

“Cas? What’s going on?”

Cas doesn’t respond. He doesn’t even move, as if moving an inch was too much a risk. Dean runs back to him, drops to his knees beside him but doesn’t dare to touch.

He should have noticed something was wrong. Was he this pale half a minute ago? Was his jaw this tense? Were his breaths this strained and shallow?

The lines around Cas’s eyes fold into deep creases as his eyelids fend off the cold light. The heels of his palms go white, driving hard into his temples, telling Dean everything he needs to know.

“Just a moment,” Dean says, voice hushed to avoid further irritation. “I’ll get you something to make it better.”

He hates to leave him alone, but the nearest pills are probably in Dean’s bedroom. He’ll make it there and back as quickly as possible, he turns the kitchen lights off on his way out, leaving Cas in the dimmed light from the laptop screen.

Tylenol should do the job if it’s a regular migraine. It’s gotta be. Cas’s first, intensified through his supersensitive perception of pain. World must have felt different when Cas was this powerful being stuffed into a condom of a human body. He hurt sometimes, when his injuries were severe, but to Dean’s knowledge it only concerned grace-deep cuts and not flesh wounds, not human ailments. So when the vessel’s nerve endings became Cas’s own, there was bound to occur some exaggeration that’d take some getting used to to normalize.

The very first week after Cas’s fall, a knife cut took him by surprise, drawing the loudest yell from his mouth that Dean had ever heard him produce. Soon after that, a papercut reduced Cas into a cranky six year old with a booboo.

It’s the same now; just one of the things Cas will have to learn to live with. If only Dean could spare him that, he would. He’d take the migraine—it’d be nothing for him. For Cas, going by his grunts and the wet streak on his cheek, it’s agony.

“Take these,” Dean says, holding two pills on an open palm, a glass of cold water in the other.

It’s a visible struggle for Cas to pull his hand away from his temple, but the promise of relief must be tempting enough. He takes the pills and swallows them at once without washing them down. Dean makes him drink half a glass anyway.

“How much longer?” Cas grumbles, in expectation of an instant reprieve.

Dean gives his knee a reassuring squeeze.

“Give it a moment. Well, a longer moment,” he adds, reaching to Cas’s fringe that’s glued to his forehead with cold sweat. He swipes his hair off his face and checks for temperature, but Cas doesn’t seem heated. “It’s just a migraine,” he mutters, trying to find comfort in his own words as much as giving it to Cas. “Let’s get you back to bed.”

Despite Cas’s quiet protest, Dean manages to get him off the chair. He serves as a stable support as they slowly, step by step, make their way along the dark corridor. Half-way through, Dean considers carrying Cas full bridal-style, but shakes the idea off for the sake of Cas’s dignity.

At last they arrive in their dark and pleasantly chill bedroom. For the first time since moving in, Dean’s genuinely grateful for the lack of windows. Cutting off as many stimuli as possible is crucial in relieving migraines, and here Cas can’t complain about light or the noise from the street or birds outside.

Dean lets Cas down slowly on the bed, where he rolls over to his side, a curled up bulge in the faint light seeping in through the door. His palms land on his temples again, slightly trembling from the exertion. Dean walks around the bed and lies on the mattress behind Cas gently not to cause too much stir. He never takes his eyes off Cas’s quivering shape. A few times he raises and drops his hand before finally reaching to the damp hair on Cas’s nape. The man doesn’t react to the touch at all, which probably means it at least doesn’t make things worse.

If only cradling Cas in Dean’s arms could help, holding him close to his chest and running fingers through his hair, he’d hold him for hours. But it can’t help and all Dean can do is wait patiently for the pills to start working, listening to Cas’s muffled whimpers.

It takes the pills a good twenty minutes to properly take effect. Dean can tell he got better from the way Cas’s body at last relaxes. He shifts back a little, to press his body close to Dean’s, though his head remains where it was on his soft, damp pillow.

“Better?” Dean whispers, afraid to strike a hard note. The word sounds too loud as it is, in this soothing quiet.

“Yes,” Cas replies slowly, unsure of his voice and whether speaking won’t make it worse. He lets out a soft sigh. “Much better.”

Relieved, Dean gives Cas’s hair the last stroke and moves the hand from Cas’s nape to his shoulder to give it a squeeze.

“No, put it back,” Cas says quickly and Dean obeys.

“Does this help?”

“Just feels nice.”

Dean huffs a chuckle and leans forward to place a sweet kiss on Cas’s neck where it meets his back.

“I’m glad you’re not hurting so much anymore. You gave me a scare there, buddy.”

“I’m sorry,” Cas mutters, as if it was his fault. “I overreacted, it wasn’t even—”

“Hey, you didn’t overreact. Feeling pain doesn’t make you not tough or whatever. Just hold on to that pill bottle. Next time take them before it gets this bad, okay?”

“Okay,” he says. After a moment of silence, he adds bitterly, “I hope I’ll get used to pain eventually.”

It’s something Dean wishes Cas would never have to get used to. It’s not like he never hurt as an angel. He was a warrior. He’s been stabbed and shot and exploded. From what Cas told Dean, it just didn’t feel the same when he was a celestial being. Even the deep cuts right into his very grace felt different than harm done to his body. Not necessarily less painful, just—different.

At least, when he got wounded, he knew why it hurt. But a migraine—a random, asshole drilling in his head? That’s a new thing for him entirely.

“I just need a few more minutes and we can go,” Cas says, reaching up to his nightstand for his phone.

Dean grabs his hand and pulls the phone out of it. “You’re not going anywhere. Sam’s gonna phone it in, pass on the info and someone else will take care of it. We’re not the only hunters in the country, you know?”

“You wanted to kick the X-Man’s ass.”

It’s good to see some of Cas’s humor coming back, too. Dean will need to make sure to stock up on painkillers in case this happens again. Hopefully it won’t. Hopefully it was a one-time thing—bad blood pressure, the beginning of flu they’ll need to worry about tomorrow, awful sleeping position straining Cas’s neck—not a chronic pain. Though even with that, as long as the pills help, Dean’ll know how to deal.

“He’s gonna get off easy this time.”


	3. Chapter 3

The steady motion of Dean’s hand never falters as it slides up and down Cas’s hunched back. His t-shirt is drained with the cold sweat, the legs of his new jeans soak in all the filth from the bathroom floor where his knees have instilled themselves into the cracked tiles. Dean couldn’t give fewer fucks about that and about the stiffness of his own legs, though they really could have picked a nicer motel. Cas’s knees must hurt much more anyway, as well as his spine curled into a hook, his fingers biting into the plastic toilet seat. They’re still not enough for a distraction from the inexorable pain in his skull, breaking him in half, tearing at his insides for nearly an hour now.

There’s nothing in Cas’s stomach anymore, he puked out his entire breakfast in the first load, together with all the pills he swallowed, before they could even dissolve. After that it has been mostly bile and spit dripping out of his mouth into the toilet bowl. His stomach doesn’t stop revolting, his muscles constrict violently with an invariable frequency, like they’re never gonna give up, like they’re trying to squeeze the pain out of his head through his throat but got it all wrong.

Dean always imagined Cas’s first session of hugging the toilet completely differently. He thought more in terms of a hangover after a whole night of whiskey and fun. He’d still stay with him, soothe his back, he’d pet his hair that’s too short to need holding back. He’d mutter some taunting jokes and moral teachings about the negative effects of excessive drinking that Cas would not listen to anyway, too busy with regret.

All those scenarios, painted in shades of amused empathy, ended with a bottle of water and a greasy breakfast and a happy ending of a relief and Cas’s vows to never drink that much again. At the same time, none of them predicted the choking sympathy streaming down Dean’s face in tears and the long nails of fear slowly creeping up from the bottom of his spine.

“Sam’ll be back soon,” Dean whispers, brushing off Cas’s bangs as the man uses a short moment of peace to loosen the muscles of his tired back. His hands are at his temples again, circling movements of the heels of his palms drilling in rather than massaging. “Come on, let’s get you to bed.”

With a soft pull at his elbow, Dean’s trying to peel Cas off the dirty tiles. He’d feel much better lying under warm blankets, with a bucket right in his reach, rather than here, on the cold floor, but Cas’s fists remain stubbornly locked around the edge of the seat, nevermind the cold and the stink. So Dean lets that idea go and leaves him just for a moment to retrieve a blanket from the room that he throws over Cas’s shoulders.

Sam should have been back from the pharmacy long ago and as the dark, moan-filled minutes tick by, Dean’s worry, so far focused solely on Cas, begins to double. Between Cas’s unyielding headache and the lack of proper medication for it, he really doesn’t have headspace for planning a jail break because his brother got busted stealing prescription drugs.

It’s the third time, just this week, that Cas’s migraine attacks. Fourth overall. Each time doesn’t get any better than the last, on the contrary, every attack lasts longer, breaks Cas harder and there’s no getting used to that, there’s no raising of the pain threshold and Dean’s not sure for how much longer he’ll be able to still call them just migraines, before reaching to some other words, more scary words.

The episodes went from half an hour and half an hour more of slow easing with a help of two Tylenols that first morning, through nearly fainting in the middle of the library, when pain didn’t give way for four hours, to puking out all the pills and insides and Dean isn’t ready to discover where it’ll lead next.

For now, Dean does his best to remain calm, if only to keep Cas off the verge of panic. But looking at the growing frequency of the attacks, their accelerating strength, he won’t hold up his act for much longer. Neither will Cas refrain from fracturing his skull from the pressure, it seems like he’s getting dangerously close to that at times.

Cas’s bowels twist again and his head shoots forward over the toilet to fill the place with nasty noises and a nastier smell, again. Dean’s hands rise to Cas’s neck as if on a trained instinct.

“I’m taking you to the doctor when you can stand up,” he promises and gets a grumpy murmur in reply.

In the room outside, the door clicks open and Sam announces his arrival.

“Thank god,” Dean huffs, feeling a big chunk of weight falling off his chest—much more still remained inside it, burdening his lungs.

A ray of afternoon sun falls into the bathroom as Sam opens the door, but his huge shape blocks it right away. He’s holding a bag in his hand that he wordlessly passes to Dean. The reason for Sam’s hold up ceases to matter, when Dean pulls a bottle out of the rustling bag. There’s Sam’s fake name on it, so it’s not hard to guess that he forged the prescription instead of attempting to pick-pocket an under the counter medicine.

“Look, Cas, it’s here, it’s gonna be over soon,” Dean promises. He shouldn’t promise something he can’t guarantee, nor something that’s as temporary as the relief of his pain, but he does anyway.

He pulls out the syringe and rips up the package. He inserts the needle with skillful fingers, as if he’s done it a thousand times before. He’s gonna need light for this one and he apologizes to Cas, kissing his shoulder, before giving Sam a sign to turn it on.

Sam’s standing awkwardly in the doorway, staring sympathetically at Cas’s curved back, as if unsure whether he should help or leave the two of them to themselves. Dean doesn’t care either way. He sucks in a precise dose of the pale yellow liquid and flicks the plastic a few times to get rid of all air.

“Almost here. Give me your arm,” he asks, but ends up having to force Cas’s hand away from his head. “Just a few seconds, babe, ‘kay?”

Cas’s jaw tenses, but he stretches out his arm to him, revealing a frail net of blue veins in the soft crook of his elbow, that require a few slaps to become prominent. With one hand, Dean immobilizes his forearm, with the other he gently inserts the steel needle under his skin and pumps the medicine in. Cas doesn’t even notice the sting, too overcome with the supernova in his head.

With the drug circulating his body, Cas finally agrees to leave the bathroom, as long as the curtains are shut. The ease comes in gradually: first Cas’s gagging stops, then his eyes open. At last the hands fall off his temples and Dean feels like he’s breathing again. As he pours himself into the bed next to Cas, in the comforting, little ritual of theirs that formed way too quickly, he keeps thinking about how much pain he’d have spared Cas if he thought of supplying himself with the injection earlier.

Cas falls asleep soon after the last tension abandons his skull. Dean’s stomach is too full of writhing snakes to let him nap. Instead, he watches Cas’s face in the dimmed, brownish light seeping through the thin fabric of the curtains, taking in the peaceful image, the smoothened lines on his brow, his lips, slightly parted for better breathing. He’s savoring it while it lasts, because it seems like there’s less and less of it lately.

The evening’s long passed by the time Cas awakens. His eyelids lift slowly and he doesn’t move an inch, as if the slightest twitch could bring back the agony in his skull. Dean doesn’t dare move either; he only watches as the silver moonlight turns the blue of Cas’s irises dark. It colors his skin, too, into a play of gray and black. It hardly seems different than it does in full light, these days, with the deep circles under his eyes, an ashen complexion.

Maybe now that they stocked up on meds stronger than your regular ibuprofen, they can keep the headaches in check and, with enough rest, the color will return to Cas’s cheeks. Maybe. Dean’ll have to leave it at that because the alternative—

No. For now, Cas’s eyes are clear of fog when they look up at Dean’s and that’s what matters.

For now, a corner of Cas’s lips curls up in a playful, little smile.

“Hypocrite,” he says and it takes Dean a beat. He expected something along the lines of ‘hello’. But he deserved that, didn’t he?

“It’s not my fault you’re so pretty when you’re sleeping.”

Cas’s nose scrunches up and, for a heartbeat, Dean’s scared that another headache is starting, but the smile returns to Cas’s lips as quickly as it disappeared, a bit wider this time.

“It is a little creepy,” Cas admits.

Dean huffs a chuckle.

To his defense, there’s a big difference between Dean watching over the man who’s asleep in his arms and Cas popping up in Dean’s room out of nowhere, with a flutter of his wings, and staring at Dean’s drooling face for God knows how long. Dean could never deduce whether Cas’s arrival was what woke him up or if he’d been there for an hour, freakishly still and almost breathless.

That’s one of Cas’s angelic habits Dean won’t miss. Especially not when he can fall asleep with Cas by his side, sleep soundly in his arms all night long, and wake up to Cas’s face nuzzled into the back of his neck, his warmth pressed tight right behind him.

Cas doesn’t disappear mid-sentence anymore, doesn’t even leave the bed in the morning, if he can help it, until Dean’s awake too. Another perk of Cas’s fall.

Dean can never tell him that there’s a part of him that’s a little happy Cas isn’t an angel anymore—it’d be cruel and fucking selfish. For an angel, losing all of his grace must have felt like losing a core part of him. How can Dean ever be content with that?

Besides, right now, human or not, the only thing that’ll make Dean truly happy is if Cas is healthy and free of this stupid pain.

“Well,” Dean says, pushing down the temptation to swipe away the strands of hair off Cas’s forehead, and reaching for his hand instead, “now you know how I felt all that time.”

Instead of pulling away, Dean shifts his entire body closer to Cas. He’s not sure what Cas wants to do now, since he probably won’t fall asleep after the prolonged afternoon nap, but Dean, now much calmer, could use a little shut-eye. Cas doesn’t protest when Dean wraps his arm around his waist, nor when he slips his ankle between Cas’s.

Dean needs to feel Cas’s body, he needs it more than usually. Instead of Cas’s loose hold and the pillow of his arm, he needs his curled shape hidden in his embrace just so not a single twist can go unnoticed. He needs Cas’s safe warmth pressed against him, his steady breath sending cool puffs of air on Dean’s chest.

Cas seems to have a different idea about this new sleeping arrangement. Under their cover his fingers find the hem of Dean’s t-shirt, sneak in, first slowly, one by one, caressing the skin over his spine. Before Dean can react, Cas’s calf is up around his hip and Cas’s lips trace the rise of his collarbone.

It doesn’t take more for his cock to react with demanding throbbing in his boxers and Dean’s honestly quite surprised it hasn’t full-on erected yet, spoilt and needy as it is when it comes to Cas, running on fumes of Dean’s hand in the shower for longer than it’s used to (and the dick got used to Cas’s embrace quickly).

But even if his dick was about to detach from his body in frustration and want, Dean would still pull away, put his palm on Cas’s shoulder to hold him back. And it’s got nothing to do with Cas’s unwashed teeth post-sleep and worse yet, post-vomit, though normally Dean’s first reaction would have been to kick Cas out to the bathroom.

It’s something else entirely that makes him break away.

“Your head, man,” Dean explains with concern in response to Cas’s confused expression.

“What about it?”

Now it’s Dean who’s confused with his recklessness. Cas’s calf slides down along his, the hand retrieves quickly right after.

“What if a raised pulse and pressure triggers the pain?”

Cas stares at him for a moment as if he said something extremely difficult to grasp, but then, instead of nodding and giving up, going back to the just-cuddle mode, he licks his lips and shakes his head.

“It hasn’t occurred so far,” he answers, evoking the playful smile back on his face. “What if it helps, for example by relieving stress? I’ll take the chance.”

Dean considers his response for a beat. Relieving stress would make sense if stress was the cause of Cas’s problem. If it’s anything else, well, Dean’s pretty sure sex has been known to cure many ailments. He should know something about it with his experience. Obviously all of his ailments have always been of a more spiritual nature than physical and sex served merely as a band aid that would fall away as soon as he fled the motel room, but who knows, maybe it is worth a try.

But before he can express his opinion either way, something that Cas said raises his suspicion.

“Wait, what do you mean? We haven’t had sex since it started.”

“See? I think you’d say that this thing is turning me into a monk and neither of us would want that. Well, they are devout people and nice, too. There was once this one Benedictine monk called Jacob who—”

“Cas, stop it.” Dean barely manages to keep his voice below a shout and feels his conscience kicking in right away, but Cas could probably retell him the entirety of Jacob the Monk’s life plus the history of the Order itself if it could spare him answering the question. Dean can’t have that, because there’s something really sketchy in the way Cas started to act. “What did you mean it never happened so far?” he repeats. “How long have you had these headaches?”

Cas has lost and he knows it, Dean can read him like a book. He shifts away far enough to have a good view on Dean’s face, or maybe to have a possibility of turning his eyes away. Dean’s stare is relentless, demanding the answer and yet, he fears it.

“Well, technically… since the very fall, I guess,” he admits and Dean’s not particularly surprised anymore, but his throat feels tighter suddenly, like it’s narrowed too thin to let his swallow down. “But it was nothing, I swear,” Cas continues, in answer to concern in Dean’s eyes. “My head would just pound a little for the first two weeks, I was sure it would settle down eventually, that it was just one of the things accompanying the fall.”

“Two weeks? And then?”

Cas is quiet for a moment then admits.

“Then it became a little irritating, but still nothing I couldn’t handle. I’d just lie down for a while and it would pass within minutes. An hour maybe.”

“God dammit, Cas. And you never thought to tell me about it? Heads are not supposed to hurt without a reason!”

“I just didn’t want to bother you, it didn’t seem that important.”

Dean needs to calm down. Being angry at Cas is the last thing he wants. It’s the headaches he’s really angry at, another unknown factor, another disaster, just when they thought things would be good, for once.

“And it wasn’t this bad until now?”

“Yes, the last four headaches were the only ones this bad. So far.”

Dean wishes he hadn’t added the last words. He wishes there wasn’t so much fear piercing out through them. Cas is scared. Not of the consequences of his ailment, because Cas is not equipped to take care of himself. He’s scared of what the next attack will do to him, how bad it’ll get. He’s scared, not knowing how much time he’s got left until he ends up puking his guts out again. Not longer than three days, that’s for sure.

“You should have told me, Cas.” Dean’s voice is quiet and sweet again, as he takes Cas into his embrace like a porcelain doll. “You shouldn’t have to go through this alone,” he mutters into his hair.

Cas’s chest rises sharply, like he’s about to say something, but he resigns and lets the air out. But Dean knows what he wanted to say or at least what he was thinking about. Because who is Dean to ask him now to share his problems? He, who never listened? All these times when Cas was being broken into shards and came to Dean for help, Dean never had time for him. Ninety per cent of time there was too much on his mind to spare Cas a minute for so much as a conversation, how could he ask Cas to open up to him now?

Even if there’s no more distance between them, and Dean even worked himself up to calling him his boyfriend and it only took him a month since that inventory.

“Do you think it might have some angelic basis?” Dean changes the topic, admitting to the thought that he’s had for some time now, the idea that he was too scared to articulate. Angelic stuff never meant anything good, and if now, though Heaven is closed—especially now, when the access to its resources and begging angels for help or information has been completely destroyed—it still haunts them, it just means that they’re in shit too deep for their boots, again. And they don’t have a sidekick angel at their disposal this time.

“We should take that possibility into consideration.”

“Okay,” Dean murmurs, kissing the top of Cas’s head. “Okay. Tomorrow, we’ll start looking everywhere. We’ll find something, I’m sure. You haven’t gone through even half of the library yet, it’s crazy huge.” He can feel Cas’s lips on his chest shape into a smile. “And you know what, maybe it’s better if it’s angelic, I mean, the human stuff? It can be nasty,” he says, before the meaning of the words hits him and neither of them is smiling anymore.


	4. Chapter 4

Sam drops another pile of old books on the table. Dean’s hand itches to reach for one of them, but he’s still only halfway through the one resting before him. It’s full of angel lore, though mostly it’s basic stuff they went through already after Cas first appeared to Dean. He still has to go through it, line by line, just in case the old-ass scribbles might reveal some miraculous cure.

If only it could go any quicker. They didn’t even make much of a dent in the library collection, there are still so many books to go through and three sets of eyes can only consume them so fast.

Dean hopes this won’t be a Goldilocks kind of thing where they find the solution in the very last book—no, that’s a lie; he’d gladly read every damn book here and in the Library of Alexandria if he only knew for sure that one of them contains the cure. It’s the uncertainty that’s killing him. After all, angels aren’t supposed to have headaches. Because angels aren’t supposed to close the Gates of Heaven and fall.

That’s usually the problem with setting the precedence on the cosmic level. What could some self-proclaimed angelology specialist who lived hundreds of years before Cas took on his vessel and came to earth know about celestial neurology.

jams his knuckles into his eyes and begins to rub them. Dean’s beginning to wish Sam hadn’t shot Crowley dead as soon as he cured him. He’d been playing an angel brain doctor lately, maybe he’d had any guesses. But what’s done is done and all they got left are those friggin’ books.

And the internet. If this is a human thing, after all, they’re not gonna find anything in any churchey volumes, no matter how old and obscure they get. Sam eyes him, as he reaches for the laptop, but doesn’t say anything—there’s occult stuff on the internet too, if you know where to look.

But that’s not where Dean’s looking. He begins with ‘migraine’ in the search bar that leads him down the rabbit hole of medical sites.

It starts comforting: yes, migraines last for hours, yes, they can cause vomiting, no, they’re not deadly. But as is with the internet, it all goes downhill quickly: namely, brain tumors. The benign kind, the malignant kind—neither makes Dean feel too good. The symptoms match, some of them at least. If that’s it, it will only get worse from there. The headaches might evolve into nastier yet things, like blindness, rage, disorientation and what have you, depending on where the thing nestled itself inside Cas’s brain.

No, there’s no fucking thing in there, Dean reminds himself. It’s just a migraine, that is all. And yet he keeps clicking through links. He dives into the talks of chemotherapy and brain surgeries, the survival rate and the list of side effects, each one making him more and more sick in his stomach.

Beyond Dean’s screen, Cas jams his knuckles into his eyes and begins to rub them, quite vehemently. Dean watches him, carefully, as a weight drops into his stomach.

“You good, Cas?”

Cas blinks at the page a few times, as if his eyes were failing him and Dean can’t help mentally going through that laundry list of symptoms again.

“I’m good, just getting tired,” Cas answers, not even looking up at Dean. He turns the page with one hand, the other reaching for his eye again.

“You sure? You don’t have a blurry vision?” Beside him, Sam bends over the armrest of his chair to peak at his screen but Dean doesn’t care. He needs to hear from Cas that he’s okay and that he’s not going blind. “Or black spots, or—”

“No, everything’s fine,” Cas says, firmer.

But he doesn’t seem fine. He hasn’t in a while. Ashen circles under his eyes, pale skin, the entire body always gravitating toward the ground.

“Maybe you should get some rest before you get a headache, again.”

“Dean!” Cas slams the book on the table, a little too harshly. The teaspoon clinks in Cas’s wing-cup. There’s something more Cas wants to say, probably repeat that he is truly fine and Dean should maybe trust him a little more, or tell him to stop smothering him. But instead, he grabs his cup off the table as he gets up. “I’ll go make some tea. You two want something?”

The only thing Dean wants is for Cas to be healthy again, so he just shakes his head and Cas leaves the room.

Dean can almost feel Sam’s glare on the side of his head.

“You know this is the worst thing you could be doing right now, right?” Sam says, pointing at the screen. There’s a video from a surgery playing on it, all blood and drills boring through the skull.

Dean closes the laptop.

“I’m just covering all our bases.”

“Or you could take him to a doctor to check whether it’s something human. Doctors are much better at this than Google.”

Dean takes the advice to heart and sets up an appointment for the very next day a few counties over—to make sure they keep their anonymity. Just in case. Like, for instance, if the lab machines go off detecting less than human particles in his blood.

“What do you mean you still got grace left in you?” Dean whispers, hardly louder than the rustling of the magazine somewhere beside them.

Cas doesn’t seem too phased with the surprise in Dean’s voice. “It’s just not all gone, yet.”

Dean pinches the bridge of his nose. “Awesome.”

It’s been weeks since Cas admitted that for all intents and purposes he was completely human. And ever since, he never gave Dean a reason to doubt that. He slept, he had needs, he got drunk, his feet stank when he pulled them out of his boots after a hunt. Cas the ex-angel of the lord seemed to be as human as can be and, luckily, adapting to his new life quickly.

Not like the last time, when Cas fell gradually, losing his grace slowly until he blew himself up and landed in the hospital, completely powerless.

Apparently, this time things got a bit twisted and Dean can’t be blamed for freaking out a little, when Cas deigns to inform him that he might still have some powered grace in him. Especially since they are already sitting in the waiting room of the doctor’s office.

“Can it influence the tests somehow?” Dean asks. “Bloodwork, scan, any of them?”

“I doubt that, no,” Cas says, without hesitation. “Angelic grace operates on a completely different plane than human technology. I mean, if humans could find out an angel this way, there’d have been official recognition of our— their existence already. They can’t even find a soul even though they have it literally under their noses.”

That’s a relief. Alarms going off on Cas would not be the best idea, especially with people and military agencies still being a little touchy after that recent global show of light slash earthquake extravaganza.

“Okay, good. How come you never mentioned that before?”

“It’s a known fact.”

“No, I mean you, still having some juice in you.”

Cas shrugs.

“I wouldn’t call it ‘juice’. It doesn’t get me any powers, it doesn’t make me any less human, in any meaningful way. It just is there, residual. It’s draining away slowly, there won’t be a trace of it in two months at best.”

“And then you’ll be like…”

“Same as I am now. Well,” he adds matter-of-factly, “that is if I make it that long.”

“What the fuck, man?” Dean snaps. How the hell did they arrive at this point? It was supposed to be Dean who gets all hung up on all the worst possible scenarios here, not Cas. Then another thought occurs to Dean: what does Cas know that Dean doesn’t? “Where’s this coming from?”

“I can use the internet too, you know?”

Dean shakes his head. Right. At least they’re both on the same, slightly paranoid page. He almost echoes Sam’s anti-internet diagnosis wisdom at Cas, but instead, he finds Cas’s palm and gives it a reassuring squeeze.

“For all we know, it’s just a migraine and you’re a big crybaby,” he manages a joke to lighten the mood and Cas smiles.

Dean nearly forgets to react when the receptionist calls Cas’s fake last name. Cas doesn’t miss a beat, though. He springs up as if burned, tension gathered in his jaw.

“Just keep to the script, you’ll be fine. I’ll be here.”

Hardly assured, Cas disappears behind the office’s door and Dean doesn’t have the best feeling. He should have gone with him, knowing how the majority of this kind of situation played out in Cas’s past. But Cas is human now, not the inspired warrior of God, and he knows a thing or two about life—and the life.

He got a story of James Cassity to memorize and internalize, just to have something to fill the employment, lifestyle, history of diseases in family and some other rubrics covered and as closely to his own too, because they’re not here to get falsified results of the interview.

Dean checks his phone for the time and he regrets not checking it as soon as Cas went in for comparison, but he’s pretty sure he’s been sitting there for a good half an hour. Or maybe it’s just the boredom and the whole sickness talk around him that makes the time stretch so horrendously.

He doesn’t have big hopes for the visit. This isn’t House MD, Cas is not gonna get a handful of referrals for every possible test. The doctor will talk to Cas about his fake family history and real symptoms, then check his pressure. If she’s in a particularly fancy mood, she might even take the blood for testing, whatever that can do, and send him away labelled hypochondriac.

And this is gonna be a huge waste of time that will bring them both back to those awful videos and the lists of every possible way for Cas to die of a headache. The truth is, if they walk out of here with a promise that Cas’s ailment is nothing but a migraine, is that ever gonna be enough? Not for Dean. Not for as long as he has to watch his boyfriend writhe in agony. And don’t doctors get things wrong all the time? Even with clean-cut human stuff, they get stuff wrong and people die, because the real problem was diagnosed too late. How can a doctor be right about the condition of a fallen angel’s head?

A sudden stir by the office door has Dean’s head shooting up. The door is open, but it’s not Cas or the doctor standing in it, but another patient running out of patience for his turn. Has he really been in there for so long? Maybe it’s just a general slip in time. Dean glances at his phone nervously, but it’s only been three minutes since the last time he checked.

The table a few steps away from him is covered with some magazines, nothing interesting, but always something to occupy his worried mind. He needs to reprimand himself before he can concentrate on reading: apparently it’s him who needs the paranoid label.

People don’t die from migraines, after all, and Cas is being oversensitive and Dean is being overprotective. Or maybe he’s just seen Cas die way too many times when he couldn’t do anything about it. Most of the times, it was simply too late to save him, because Dean ignored Cas asking for help for too long. Dean can’t let that happen again, not now, not when there isn’t even a speck of chance he’d get him back. God won’t resurrect him this time, not even, as Cas suspected once, as a punishment. Because God must simply not care about him. There are no angels to pluck his soul from Heaven and thrust it into his body, no angels to heal him. There aren’t demons who could trade Dean’s soul for Cas’s life.

The door opens again and, this time, it is Cas who stands there, palm wrapped around a piece of paper. His expression is even more spooked than before he entered.

Dean’s all over him in two seconds, grasping his elbow to pull him aside. His other hand brushes along Cas’s bare arm for comfort. There are about twenty questions torpedoing Dean’s mind, starting with things as simple as ‘what took you so long?’ to such gems as ‘how much time do you have left?’. He forces the sick creations of his gut-wrenching concern down his throat and making sure his voice is as calm as possible, he settles for:

“What did she say?”

“She believes it’s just migraines.”

There is no ease in Cas’s voice as he says that. So much for that reassurance.

“Just like that? With no tests? What’s this?”

Dean pulls the piece of paper from Cas’s hand as Cas grabs his jacket off the hanger. It’s not a referral, just a bunch of prescribed meds. Some of the names tell Dean they’re good, the others don’t mean much to him—maybe one of those puppies is gonna be able to prevent the headaches before it sets off instead of slowly relieving it after Cas has already cracked his skull, having suffered on the floor for hours.

That’s something, at least. They can’t have Sam constantly flashing his face for every camera at the apothecaries with his fake prescriptions.

“She said if it gets worse despite the medications, I should come back for a referral for an MRI.”

Dean stops in his tracks on their way to the car. “So it might not be migraines?”

“I suppose it’s migraines until proven wrong,” Cas says in a small, resigned voice.

Dean’s fist wraps tightly around the keys in his pocket. It’s a struggle not to turn around, barge into the doctor’s office and tell her what he thinks about the whole Schrödinger’s migraines. It’s Cas’s life and health that’s at the stake and they’re supposed to wait and see? This is not gonna fly. Dean was right, this was a waste of time. He’s gonna have to look for better ways to save Cas.

“A healer?” Sam’s eyebrows raise all the way up to his hairline, as if Dean’s just told him he’s planning to sign up for ballet classes.

“A healer,” Dean answers, turning a page that gives off a distinct smell of mold and stains his fingers with it.

Sam, who’s terrible at masking his bewilderment, or maybe not even trying, leans forwards in his chair.

“You wanna take Cas to a healer?” He makes sure, again, that he heard Dean correctly. “I thought you hated healers. You always say they’re a pile of bullcrap.”

Dean turns his eyes to the page, slides them over paragraphs of strange, curly writing, which technically is in English, but at the same time it very much isn’t. He’s not even sure why he picked this particular book, probably because it looked old enough and had a sketch of what looked like a man with a halo, but ended up being of little use, except for irritating Dean’s nose and possibly giving him allergy.

Sam is right, Dean hates healers. In their life-long history with the supernatural, they’ve only encountered a guy who was a real deal—no reapers attached—once. And that guy was no one other than amnesiac Cas, a.k.a. an angel, which, in their position, is not very helpful, since the angels are locked away. The rest of them, the fully human ones, were all a sham one way or another, making a big show for even bigger money and driving naive folk to death.

“Alright, maybe not a healer,” he admits. “But someone who knows stuff, not some civilian doctor, who can’t even spot a soul under his own nose.” He only realizes he’s quoting Cas when he’s already half-way through the sentence, but he can’t even muster a smile. He shuts the stinky book with a bang and pushes it to the other end of the table, as far as possible. “Come on, man, I’m a little desperate here!”

Dean barely manages to hush his voice as his chest tightens, not with anger, but with choking frustration. Not enough or too late, apparently. As he shifts his head to the far aisle of books, Cas’s eyes are turned to him from over the open book he’s holding. His fingers are stuck on an inked line he abandoned to take notice of the noise. Dean tips his head at him, as if asking ‘how ya doin’?’, with a warm smile. The smile he gets in response is worn out and shy.

Even from here, the fatigue in Cas’s shape is striking. Both his feet are fixed steady to the ground, his elbow snuck its way between old volumes and rests there to provide Cas with support. His moves are slow and calculated as he lowers his head back to the book, like a movement a speck too rapid can throw him down to his knees.

It’s that fear permeating in his every gesture which is so much worse than the hauntingly weary look in his eyes and the paled grayness of his complexion that takes on shades of green during each attack to fade back again. Dean would rather have him here, up close, curled into a soft ball on the armchair, unmoving and ashen, straining his muscles to raise the burdened corners of his mouth.

“You can’t possibly still believe it’s just migraines,” he dares his brother. “The freaking injections have stopped working.”

It’s not that the attacks damage Cas physically, at least not to the best of their knowledge. Once the pain is gone and Cas naps it off, he’s good as new. Or at least he would be, if the paralyzing memory of that crashing pain could be cut out and thrown away. Because their psychological toll is enormous. With the consuming fear always at the front of his mind, Cas has closed off and lost his orientation. He seems to slip away. He is slipping away through Dean’s fingers, no matter how hard Dean’s trying to cradle him whole. Cas has become like an exposed nerve, vulnerable and always awaiting hits, with every second bringing him closer to running out of seconds.

The empathy settles in Sam’s jaw as he nods.

“Okay, you’re right. We’ll find someone who can help him,” he promises solemnly. “Don’t worry.”

It’s good to have Sam on his side and Dean should be glad. He’s got his understanding, support, and help and he doesn’t feel like he’s all alone going crazy when even Cas, despite himself, keeps saying he’s fine. But Sam admitting the terrifying truth means that it is real and he can no longer tell himself little lies to squash the anxiety and let him fall asleep next to Cas wilting away.


	5. Chapter 5

Her name is Alexia Morton and she knows a thing or two, but not many know about her. That is what sells her to Dean alongside Jordan’s claims that she’s the only reason his baby girl is alive and well. The frauds usually go more for money and fame, the disgusting attention seekers that they are. Although she’s quite new at this, she knows what she’s doing, the hunter explained, and Dean decided that an old hand like him would smell a fake and never entrust his wife’s and daughter’s life to someone he didn’t check out thoroughly.

She lives in Nebraska, in a town scarcely bigger than Lebanon. They arrive at the right address without any problems. The little, green house doesn’t look any different than the rest of the surrounding houses, it doesn’t give off any mysterious or ominous witchy vibes. It doesn’t have a giant tent in the backyard, so that’s a good sign.

Cas takes it slow out of the car, even though by the annoyance on his face Dean can tell he hates how slow he’s become. He used to be able to fly to the other side of the world and across five dimensions in a fraction of a second. Now he needs a goddamn minute to stick his limbs out of the car, his head hung low.

Dean helps him out, despite Cas’s pride dictating him to push Dean away.

“Come on, man, I know you’re tough,” he says, leaning to his ear, when Cas is finally upright.

Cas still refuses to rely on Dean’s shoulder as they walk up the long driveway. After all, he’s not weak, a little sleep deprived maybe, and above all tired, but he can walk just fine and doesn’t need Dean to be a mother hen every waking second.

“I hope she’s home,” Sam mutters from somewhere behind them, as if Dean wouldn’t wait even through the night at her doorstep if need be. But it’s not like they have much time with Cas getting worse each day.

Luckily, Alexia is home. She opens the door with a smile that wanes at the sight of strange men on her porch. She can’t be older than twenty five and looks as non-mysterious as can be, but then, looks can be deceiving. She’s tiny and blonde, with plump fingers and a wide mouth that pouts at Dean when he’s explaining how they learned about her.

“So much for ‘don’t go round yapping about me’,” she grumbles, thrusting her palms into the pockets of her jean shorts.

“No worries, it was just a private conversation,” he assures her. “It was me who called him.”

And begged him. And begged everyone he knew. But this part he doesn’t say. It felt so much like a deja vu: sitting in a room with a phone glued to his hand, dial a number after a number until his contact list ran out of them. Half of the time what answered was a silence of a dropped number. A mere five times was he greeted with the notice of death and he considered the low count pretty fortunate as it’d been a long time since he’d updated the list, some over two and a half years ago when he nearly lost his brother.

“Alright, I just don’t want crowds here. So you’re hunters too?” she asks, but it hardly sounds like a question and she doesn’t wait for an answer either. She tips her head to Cas’s pale face. “I don’t have to ask which one of you needs help.”

She waves her hand at them to follow her into the living room, sunny on modern, with a fireplace and a narrow couch that the three of them squeeze into.

“So, what are you?” Sam asks and gains himself a funny look from Dean and an offended look from Alexia.

“You come into my house and ask me what I am?” she asks, astonished.

To that Sam begins to mumble something in excuse, that it’s not what he meant, until Dean has to step in.

“We’re just wondering how you heal. If you’re like…” he illustrates what he means with his fingers spread wide over an invisible person lying in front of him, and making a buzzing sound.

Alexia laughs briefly and Dean’s not sure whether it’s his acting or his train of thoughts that’s so hilarious. She shakes her head, spilling her blonde curls into her eyes.

“I don’t ‘heal’, alright?” she informs, curling the index and the middle fingers of both her palms in a quote symbol before reaching to tuck her hair behind her ear. “It’s not like I’m some miracle child, or an angel, since we don’t have those anymore.”

Dean expected more of a sign of relief following the last line. Well, he didn’t expect a talk of angels at all, but it’s good. She can help much more if she knows what Cas was and they don’t have to use James Cassity’s life. However, the dismayed quirk of her lips tells Dean she probably wouldn’t be too thrilled if she learned they were the ones who cast the angels away.

“I just use my knowledge and resources to help people,” she continues. “Anyone could do that if they wanted. You know, herbs, rituals, you’ve done all that, I’m sure. But what you hunters use to fight, I use to cure.”

“Fair enough.”

Alexia’s features soften as her eyes land on Cas.

“So what’s the problem here?”

They fill her in on every detail they have. There is no point in withholding anything, like the fact that Cas was an angel who stayed behind. Her eyes light up at that revelation, but she doesn’t comment on it, other than that she hasn’t worked on a fallen angel yet so she can’t give promises.

“I don’t think anyone has,” Sam offers for a dubious consolation.

They start with a diagnosis, but Alexia tells them it might be grace-related in nature beforehand. Alexia says it should all go smoothly from there and Dean wants to believe her. He really does. She is the one here with big knowledge of healing—Dean only knows how to break. Still, he can’t keep his mind from wandering to when the diagnosing stage is over and Alexia’s focused face turns sullen and pitiful. Or perhaps her eyes snap open horrified as she translates the results of her test and maybe, if Cas’s sickly charm and the stubborn look of his blue irises have spurred in her any spark of affection, there’ll be even a glimpse of sorrow in them.

“Dude,” Sam snaps him out of his awful visions. “You’re shaking.”

Dean’s first reaction is to tell him to mind his own business, but when he looks down at his quivering palms, he clenches his jaw and shuts his mouth. It’s not just palms, his shoulders ache from involuntary spasms, his chest is too tight to take a breath, a feeling he should be used to by now.

He hides his hands in his pockets.

They’re in Alexia’s super secret basement that’s probably not that secret, as there are three cushions for sitting set in the center of the room and a whole set of cups sitting on a table. The place is completely different from the rest of the house, at least the parts that they’ve seen, which are bright and fresh, filled with furniture straight from pages of an Ikea catalogue. The only light here is whatever can streak in through the tiny windows just under the ceiling and the glow of candles lined along the walls. The air is stuffy with the scent of incense. It is pretty witchy, alright, Dean’s ready to admit to his earlier prejudice.

Alexia grabs two of the cushions to the side, leaves one in the center of the room, for Cas. She moves on to the cabinet with herbs, pushes a few jars around, mumbling something to herself.

“Are you okay, Cas?” Dean asks.

Cas has been terribly quiet the whole day and Dean’s not sure whether it’s because he’s scared or because he doesn’t want to go through this. Doesn’t really matter. They have to do this, it’s the only thing that gives him a chance. Even if this ritual can’t cure him, even if they don’t find the cure today, it’ll at least give them some clue about what they’re dealing with.

Castiel’s eyes shift to Dean’s, their expression empty. Oh, how horribly wrong both Dean’s guesses were. Cas is not afraid of some Latin hummed over his head, not reluctant to find out the truth. He’s listless. For too long has he been shifting between excruciating pain and the anxious anticipation of the next wave of agony. Now, even with the hope of his agony being finally over he can’t bring himself to care.

So when he mutters, “I’m fine,” it’s just to get Dean off his back.

“Cas.” Dean’s fingers find Cas’s, his thumb begins to massage soothing circles into Cas’s palm. With his other hand he cups Cas’s cheek gently. “It’s gonna be all over soon. Alexia will fix these headaches and everything will be as it was, alright?”

“Yeah.”

“Cas!” Dean’s voice is firmer this time. He’s not gonna let go, until Cas’s eyes fill with anything, be it anger or fear or rage, as long as they stop looking like this.

But he has to let go. Alexia’s ready.

“Take off your shoes and sit down,” she orders Cas, waving at the cushion.

Cas kicks off his shoes without bending down to untie them. Before he moves, Dean’s palm on his cheek keeps him still, Dean’s lips place the softest kiss on his forehead.

The cushion sinks in as Cas sits on it cross-legged with his back straight and his hands loosely on his knees. Dean and Sam follow his lead and slump down on the rejected pillows, Dean keeps his eyes on level with Cas’s.

“Are you ready, Castiel?” Alexia stands behind him with a bowl of herbs in one hand, a box of matches in the other. She waits for him to nod and begins instructions. “This will not harm you, but it might trigger an attack.”

Dean’s eyes snap up to Alexia, stress turning in his stomach. Another attack wasn’t in the pamphlet. But Alexia only spares Dean an apologetic glance before returning her attention to Cas.

“You have to relax, first. Think of your favorite place, somewhere you’d like to be right now.”

Cas nods again and shuts his eyes, he drifts away in his thoughts. For just a moment Dean lets himself drift away with him, but where to, he doesn’t know. His own favorite place would be the bunker, their bedroom, their bed—or anywhere where he can keep Cas in his embrace. But Cas’s favorite place might be five millions times ago in a crater of an active volcano, on the moon, or in the Heaven of the guy with the kite that he spoke of once. Who is Dean to try to shrink the millenias of Cas’s existence to that blink of an eye that are their intertwined lives?

Alexia sets the book on a counter and the bowl between Cas’s pointed knees. As Dean expected, she begins to chant in Latin, with her hands outstretched over Cas’s form. So Dean wasn’t entirely wrong about the hands thing.

He’s not sure where she’s going with this and how the ritual is supposed to give him a cause of Cas’s ailment. Perhaps it is a kind of litmus test in which red smoke will mean one sickness, blue some other and she’ll then interpret them according to a rainbowy legend. Or maybe the smoke will spell outright what’s wrong, in plain English.

In the end, Dean doesn’t get to find out. Just before Alexia finishes her spell, Cas’s face twists in pain and his palm automatically shoots up to his temple. Dean’s stomach turns. He struggles with himself not to jump up and curl himself around Castiel, but in the spirit of looking at the bigger picture, he forces himself to look at Alexia for consent first.

The woman’s hand stops on its way to a box of matches, yet she gives Dean a ‘no’ with a miniscule movement of her head. Dean’s jaw tightens, but he stays put, wishing he could send Cas some help with his gaze and his thoughts.

He should be running to him with a needle and a pack of ice, but instead he’s sitting on the floor watching as Cas’s teeth grind so hard they threaten to snap in half. There is no slow build up anymore, the agony flares up in his skull nearly all at once and Dean has learned the nuances of Cas’s tormented expressions to know he’s about to curl up into a ball and throw up all over the floor.

There is no way they’re finishing the diagnosing now and Dean’s bellow of “Stop it, now!” gets that message across to Alexia perfectly. The woman drops the matches and offers to find something for pain in her cabinet. It’s better than the chemicals Dean stuffs into Cas, she says. Dean still pulls out the bottle from the pocket of his jacket, a syringe from another. Nowadays he never lets Cas go anywhere unprepared.

Cas’s head tilts back and his eyes shoot open and they’re all whites, rolled out to the inside of his head. He looks like he got possessed by a high-ranking demon or some freakin’ Casper the Medicine Ghost and Dean can’t hold back a shout. The candle drops from Alexia’s hand to the floor and loses its flame.

Dean gets to Cas’s side just in time to catch him when he falls backwards, saves his head from smashing against the bare floor. He fails to do the same for the glass bottle, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is Cas’s shut eyelids and opened mouth and the fact that he’s completely unresponsive to Dean’s loudest calls and gentle shaking.

His body, so far limp, goes stiff, all at once, like dumped into liquid nitrogen and frozen solid. In a moment of utter horror, Dean presses his fingers to the pulsating rhythm of the vein on Cas’s neck to make sure it’s not some freakish fast forward to rigor mortis.

“Put him down,” Sam’s voice rings somewhere nearby and the embrace of Dean’s arms tightens. “Put him down!”

Dean can’t let him go, even if Cas feels like he’s a marble statue only more fragile. Dean can’t let Sam pluck him from his hold with his coarse hands that are prying Dean’s hands away. Maybe if he holds him tightly, Cas will thaw and soften and his eyes will flutter open and the pain will go away.

Burning on his left cheek snaps Dean out of whatever frantic state he was in and he sees his brother, kneeling in front of him, repeating the mantra of ‘put him down, Dean, lay him down,’ with wide eyes and his hand is on Dean’s forearm and the other under Cas’s head like a pillow.

“It’s a seizure,” he explains calmer as Dean lets go.

Sam’s hands aren’t shaking like Dean’s are so Dean lets his brother cradle Cas and lay him down with his head on a pillow of Cas’s own jacket. How Sam retains his composure Dean doesn’t know. It’s usually him who has got it together in all emergencies, even when he sees life of a close one seeping away—especially then.

But stabbings and gunshot wounds Dean knows how to deal with. When it came to those limbs, twisted and rigid, and the narrow streaks of whites glimpsing between the rows of lashes and they were all Cas, sans his consciousness, keeping him close felt like the only thing there was left in the world.

Now he’s lying on the cold ground with his back arched and all Dean can do is keep glancing at Sam’s expression for the slightest change to indicate whether it’s still normal or already bad. If there is any ‘normal’ here, in Cas the ex-angel of the Lord,  _ his _ Cas having a seizure in the basement of a wannabe witch.

“You did this,” Dean snaps, glancing morbidly at the girl who hovers over them with a watch in one hand and the other pressing a phone to her ear.

He doesn’t really mean it, or at least he won’t, when this is all over and Cas comes round, tired but healthy. Then, Dean will apologize to her. For now, the way he sees it, she’s the one who stood the closest when Cas crumbled, she was the one who messed with his head with her spells and her incense and tweaked around his grace until it snapped and broke Cas in the process.

Alexia ignores his accusation, focused on the conversation on the line and keeping an eye on her silver watch and on Cas in turns.

Dean opens his mouth, but before he can say anything, the arch of Cas’s back breaks and Dean forgets there’s anyone in the room but Cas. When Cas falls, he doesn’t fall to rest. His muscles contract, his body writhes and Dean wishes he could hold him but he knows he can’t. All he can do it watch him spasm out of control.


	6. Chapter 6

By the time the wailing of sirens comes from outside the walls, Cas has regained his consciousness. Disoriented and exhausted, he’s lying with his head on Dean’s lap, with Dean’s fingers gently stroking his hair.

They don’t let Dean ride with Cas in the back of the ambulance and they excuse themselves with rules but offer the front seat if he insists. The wild ride in the ambulance doesn’t turn out to be as exciting as cutting through the traffic and the red lights should be. His heart is resting in the back of the van with Cas and they won’t let him know how he’s doing.

Once they arrive at the hospital, Dean walks by the gurney along the long white halls, reaching out to Cas and calming him down, wishing they’d move with him at least a little bit faster. The march doesn’t seem as frantic as it does in the medical dramas.

And then they take Cas away and Dean’s only left to wait until they probe him left and right and it’s taking forever. Once Dean’s finally allowed to see Cas for just a minute, he’s waiting for him in one of the rooms on the fourth floor. And waiting, in this case, means struggling against his closing eyelids just to see Dean before he floats away.

“How you feelin’, buddy?” Dean asks, voice hushed, as he sits on the stool next to the bed.

Cas’s room isn’t as cool as in the movies either, because it’s not even Cas’s room. There are other beds in rows, patients taking up two of them, hindering their privacy.

Cas’s voice is hoarse and weak when he speaks. “My head doesn’t hurt, so that’s nice.”

“Yeah, that’s good.” Dean musters a weak smile. He reaches for Cas’s hand with the clip from the machine attached to one finger. “You scared the shit out of me back there,” he confesses and to lighten it up he adds, “Don’t ever do that again.”

Cas doesn’t promise he won't. How could he make a promise he couldn’t possibly keep despite his best efforts, despite his own desire to keep it. But even if he did and then broke it, holding it against him would be the last thing on Dean’s mind.

“I—I don’t even remember what happened,” Cas says, turning his eyes to the white ceiling. “My head hurt and I saw you and then everything blurred and went black and I woke up and they told me I had a seizure.”

“Did they tell you anything more?”

“That they’ll do some, uh, they’ll scan my brain.”

“MRI? CAT scan?”

“Yeah,” Cas mutters, which doesn’t really answer Dean’s question, but it doesn’t matter which and Dean’s not even sure what’s the difference between them, he just knows they both consist of a wide, white tube and images of a brain where too much white or too much black means something very bad.

“Okay, good, maybe they’ll find out what’s wrong,” Dean says, but there’s nothing okay or good about it. Well, he is not okay about it, but it’s not like Cas can keep going like this when ‘this’ just keeps getting worse. Still, quiet awareness of Cas’s terrible, possibly lethal condition is one thing, having that awareness confirmed by a licensed doctor with pictures to show for it will do nothing but break Dean.

But when he looks at Cas’s face, though already pale with exhaustion, it pales further with fear, until it gives up all color, he rebukes himself internally for his selfishness. While he’s feeling sorry for himself that he might lose the love of his life, it’s Cas who’s got everything at stake.

“And then they’ll fix it, Cas,” he assures him, rubbing soothing circles into his palm.

Cas takes a moment, as if looking for the right reaction or trying to decide whether Dean’s faith is worth even a speck of his own. Eventually, he nods and they stay quiet for a while, each in his own chilling thoughts.

“Cas.” Dean disturbs the silence eventually, because he still needs to ask Cas something, before he falls asleep. He feels like an asshole when Cas startles, having drifted off a bit, but if there’s truth in what Alexia told Dean as the paramedics were packing Cas into the ambulance: they can’t wait a few hours until he sleeps the seizure off. “Do you still feel your grace in there?”

Cas doesn’t answer right off the bat, but his hesitation seems to originate in the heaviness of the answer rather than from difficulties in locating the last bits of himself.

“Yes, it’s… I feel it, barely. But it’s still there.” His helpless eyes return to Dean’s. “It’s fading away fast.”

So Alexia’s half-done diagnosis was right. She said Cas’s grace is the last ragged stitch that’s keeping Cas together. Without it he’ll fall apart into a pool of torment, seizures and—

“God,” Dean buries his face in his free palm, “I would pry Heaven’s Gates open for you if I could, just to help you get better.”

Cas makes a choked sound that might just be a mirthless chuckle.

“Dean, don’t be unreasonable. Closing Heaven was much more important than me.”

Dean’s head perks up and he’s pissed. Every single word feels like a slap to the face and a knife stabbing into the heart all at once, stirring a rush of anger in him that he can’t suppress in time.

“No!” he barks, close to a shout, which probably gets him two raised heads from the remaining beds, but he doesn’t even care to check. He only mitigates himself when he sees Cas’s flinch. “No, it’s not,” he says way calmer, but still not  _ calm _ . “Not to me.”

How can Cas even say that? How can he honestly think that protecting the world from his dick brethren is more important than his life? How— Oh God, when did Cas become such a Winchester?

“Dean.”

The name hangs in the air, pleading; begging for Dean to be sensible, to look at the bigger picture. The picture in which Cas doesn’t matter and Dean doesn’t matter, nor does Sam. But he has stared at that picture for long enough, for way too many years. And he didn’t like what he saw. The bigger picture never had a place for the three of them, they were just the q-tips used up on restoring it, soaked in centuries of its filth and then thrown away. Fuck the bigger picture.

But then Cas’s fingers wrap around Dean’s palm and squeeze. Maybe it wasn’t pleading after all, but an apology for hurting Dean. Maybe Cas understood there there is time and place to stand up with a damned megaphone and proclaim himself unworthy, but now is not the time. Not when it’s all in vain anyway.

It’s not anger anymore that causes Dean’s chest to ache and his hands to quiver.

“I can’t lose you, Cas,” he says lowly, not trusting his own vocal chords. “Okay? Not again. Not now—” It’s not anger that makes his voice break. Not ever, he adds in his head and says it with his eyes and the tremble of his lips. He says it with the backs of his fingers stroking Cas’s face, everything that he never could say with words. “You hear me, Cas?”

Cas lets go of his palm to reach to his face, wipes his thumb across his cheek and Dean can see them come away glistening with water—with tears Dean didn’t even realize he wept.

“I hear you, Dean,” Cas says, his fingers still stroking Dean’s face. “I hear you, you won’t lose me,” he promises. “I’ll do my best,” he swears. “Cross my heart and hope not to die.” He smiles.

Dean smiles too, through the wall of stones that rests on his chest. He kisses the tips of Cas’s fingers and leans to press the gentlest kiss to his forehead.

“You’re so not funny, buddy.”

The white room feels alien and cold, and even more alien is the giant white tube sitting in the middle of it. The opening is wide, allowing for some breathing space, so that’s something. Still, not the nicest place to lie motionless for close to an hour.

The doctor said it’d be great if Cas got a headache during the exam. He went on to add that a seizure, however, is not anticipated. Fucking doctor was lucky Dean wasn’t present when he gave Cas the instructions.

On the bright side, the doctor also said that Dean can accompany Cas during the scan, although this little detail Dean had to trick Cas into spilling. Whether he tried to be brave or spare Dean wasting up to forty five minutes of his time, as if Dean has anything better to do than sit by Cas’s side.

They stripped Dean down of every metal object he got on him before they let him enter the room. Wouldn’t want those to turn into bullets cutting through the air straight into the giant magnet. They didn’t have to worry about Cas, because all he got on him was the hospital gown that would flash Cas’s ass all around if he only walked a little faster than he could.

“Lie down,” comes a command from the nurse through the speakers.

Without hesitation, Cas clambers on the bed and lies down straightened with his arms along his body, his legs outstretched. For Dean, there’s a plastic chair set up, so close to the machine he can any time reach out to Cas’s hand to hold it.

“Are you sure you want to be here?” Cas asks, turning his head to Dean.

“Are you sure you want me here?”

Cas smiles. “Of course I do.”

“Good, then shut up and lie still.”

Doctors are the type of people that will inform you about your approaching demise or a death of your dad with a stone face but will maintain the same demeanor with the happy news. Dean sometimes wonders whether Stone Face Practice is not a name of actual class in med school, passing of which is required to graduate.

The problem occurs when the doctor that comes to Cas’s room has a hard time keeping up his emotionless face that he’s been mastering for years. It’s the most apparent in his eyes that stretch out a bit too widely and their gleam would put anime artists to shame.

He walks in with his gray beard, clipboard and no announcement and Dean’s stomach turns. So does Cas’s, by the look on his face and the way his fingers curl into fists. Dean reaches out to stroke his arm in reassurance.

“Good evening, mister Cassity,” he greets Cas with a weird pinch in his voice and shoots Dean a glance. “Could we talk privately?”

That is a ‘we’ve got the diagnosis’ hook, alright. A shorthand for bad news coming up next. Or maybe it’s just the general doctor-patient only secrecy policy and Dean’s just reading bad signs into everything.

Dean looks at Cas questioningly. It’s his decision whether he wants to trade with him the test results for the comfort and support Dean can provide or would rather shoulder the sentence alone and maybe share later. Dean does surely hope for the first, but he’s not gonna push. Still, Cas needs to be made aware that he’s got a choice here.

“If you want me to stay…” Dean offers and, relieved, watches Cas nod.

“Yes, I’d rather have you here,” he says quietly and turns to the doctor with a stronger, “You can say everything with Dean here.”

The doctor opens his mouth, but doesn’t say anything. Eventually, he nods and clears his throat.

“There is good news and there’s bad news,” he begins and goes quiet again.

Dean can barely believe his ears. He can’t be possibly pulling the good news/bad news shit on Cas for real. Actual people don’t do that, not unironically at least. And never when the matter is of life and death.  _ Never _ when it’s about Cas. Dean swears, if he stretches the silence a second longer in expectation or the next thing that comes out of his mouth is ‘which do you want to hear first?’, Dean will punch his face.

Luckily for all the parties involved, the doctor opens his mouth again before Dean can run out of patience and he’s already decided to pick the order for them.

“The good news is, from what we managed to gather, the changes in your brain are not tumors, which virtually eradicates the possibility of it being malignant.”

A hushed mockery of ‘virtually’ escapes Dean’s mouth before the impact of the words gets a chance to settle in. That’s it, right here, his worst fear shut down. Well, virtually shut down. He should take a deep breath and smile and pull Cas in for a hug. But before he does all that, there’s still the bad news to be heard and Cas does it a great prelude.

“So there is a change,” he asks cautiously, clogging Dean’s breath of relief on its slow trek out.

“Yes. And this is where the bad news comes in.”

There is a tension in Cas, it’s been there since the man intruded their conversation, but now it heightens visually. Cas shoulders go stiff, lips press into a thin line. The knuckles of his fists go as white as the sheets around them. Dean reaches to one of those hard stones of fists, embraces it with his own palm that he hopes is not trembling, and soothes the raised bones of the knuckles with his thumb. It doesn’t help much, Dean knows, but it’s the most he can do to let Cas know that he’s by his side and he’ll stay no matter what sentence will leave the doc’s mouth next and hang in the air between them. Whatever happens, they’ll face it together and beat it.

The doctor’s got a problem with cutting to the chase and as he keep going on about more tests they need to perform, the EEG, the PET scan and more whatever the fuck nots, Dean feels his hand become wet and sticky against Cas’s skin. He really doesn’t need names of every possible examination they’re gonna perform that he doesn’t understand and can only roughly translate some to electrodes, more white tubes, radioactivity and other kinds of prodding and he doesn’t like them one bit. But he hates this procrastinating much more.

“Just cut this whole crap and get to the point,” Dean snaps finally, sounding much less angry than he thought it would, but with enough shaking in his cadence to express all of his concern.

The doctor gapes at him, offended, as if interrupting him was a crime because he had the whole nice speech prepared and Dean wasn’t even supposed to be here to hear it, let alone cut it short, but Dean just strains the muscles in his face to raise an eyebrow at him and get him to talk.

“What is it?” he adds for a good measure, picking the more neutral version over the alternative of ‘how bad is it?’ that stung his tongue.

“What the MRI of your brain displayed what seems to be an abnormal growth of the hippocampus,” he says and noticing the question painted on Dean’s face, he explains, “The hippocampus is a structure located in the temporal lobe—”

“Responsible for creating and storing memories,” Cas cuts in and when Dean turns to him, his face is showing a weird, distant look.

“Exactly,” the doctor agrees and continues, “The hippocampus presses on the surrounding structures and raises the pressure inside the skull, hence the headaches. What is curious is why there isn’t more damage occurring,” he hangs up the thought with a theatrical finger resting on his lip, as if the very musing came to him for the first time right now, which is hardly plausible.

“Oh, yeah, it’s fascinating,” Dean ironizes, hiding his fear behind his condescending tone, which probably makes him look really stupid, but he doesn’t care, because ‘curious’ is plain cruel when he’s talking to a living human being about his brain and how by some miracle it hasn’t turned into mashed potatoes yet. Thank God is more like it, luckily at best. Curious is just plain disrespectful and Dean’s not gonna pretend it’s not just because the guy’s holding a PhD.

Of course it doesn’t take a doctor to know—which the doctor ironically can’t know— that the only reason Cas isn’t drooling yet is his fading grace. It doesn’t take a doctor either to realize what will happen when the grace drains out and there’s nothing there to save Cas’s brain from self-destruction.

“So how are you gonna fix it? Give him some shrinking pills, right? Some hormones?”

It doesn’t take a fucking mind reader either to know what the doctor’s thinking, just by the look at the miniscule tilt of his head as if there was regret hidden in there, below the layers of poorly hidden excitement. And when Dean’s head flicks to Cas’s, he doesn’t even dare to look at Dean, his eyes are fixed on the notches on the white sheet.

“The problem is that I have never seen anything like this before. Decrease of size, of course, although not even that to such extent. But growth? It is unprecedented.”

There it goes, his mask, cracking fully. The gleam that was previously restrained to just his eyes spills all over his face and seeps into his voice and even if the doc has got enough decency to stop his muscles from twisting his face into a wide, crazy grin, in Dean’s eyes it’s already there.

Dean should have guessed it from the beginning, Cas was no ordinary patient after all. It probably hasn't happened very often—or never in the history of modern medicine—that an angel, even a fallen one, landed on their probing table. There were bound to occur some discrepancies between how a human body acts and how one does once possessed—now merely occupied—by an angel.

And it is fascinating, of course, to those lacking knowledge of the whole other world co-existing with what they believe to be normal, every single creature on the side of supernatural—every vampire with its longevity and fangs, every werewolf and a god and above them all a freakin’ angel—is a damn freak of nature, a miracle. Not a person, but a material for dissection and testing and shipping off to CIA’s secret lab facilities.

There was no help for Cas here, no hope, no escape.

“Oh, so this is it.” Dean bursts out, barely keeping to his chair. His hand flies off of Cas’s and joins the other in the vivid display of anger. “This is what you need all those tests for. He’s your fucking guinea pig! You’re gonna probe him and cash on your books about the freak of nature while his brain explodes! That’s all he is to you, isn’t it? A fucking anomaly!”

The doctor stares at him with eyes wide with shock and the stupid excitement gone from his face for the moment. Dean’s bellow probably woke half of the ward and the nurses are already on their way to find out what’s happening, but he doesn’t care. He doesn’t care about Cas’s hand pulling at the side of his shirt either as his lips repeatedly form his name. He can’t stop, there’s been too many things piling in his stomach that are now boiling.

“Dean.”

“You don’t know how to help him and you don’t want to! You’d rather cut him up into pieces and make a fucking scrapbook!”

“Dean!” Cas’s voice is louder this time and there’s some exasperation in it, or hurt, or both probably and, before Cas tugs his shirt again, Dean knows he went way out of line with the last one, not for the smug fucker doctor, but for Cas.

For Cas, whose brain and life is at stake here. For Cas, whom Dean just called a freak and abnormality and even if it wasn’t meant to come off that way, it still struck straight into Cas.

The bucket of cold water serves Dean right and sits him back straight on his chair, his hands land on his lap too ashamed to even touch Cas now.

“Oh God, I’m so sorry, Cas.”

He hunches in his seat and buries his face in his palms, as Cas reaches to his shoulder.

“Just calm down, Dean,” he soothes and Dean hears him say “I’m sorry, doctor.”

Dean doesn’t even raise his eyes to the doc, aware his shock’s washed away quickly.

“It’s alright. It’s a natural reaction to this kind of news. I’ll let you two talk it through now,” he offers and stands up to leave.

“Wait,” Dean calls to him, hoping there’s no more anger in his voice, nothing to spark back up into flame when he looks at the doctor’s face again. He needs to be meek now, groveling if he must.

The doctor stops and turns to Dean, expectantly.

“Is there really nothing you can do?” he asks with a pressure on ‘really’ and then gives up and sells Cas out. “After all your tests, whatever you need to do, there must be some way. You can’t just let him die.”

“This is what the tests are for,” he lies, as if Dean’s whole outburst uncovering their cruel motives never happened. “And yes, we have, um, there is something we can do, something we plan to do.”

For just a fraction of a second Dean allows his heart to grow in relief but as the doctor’s face falls serious for the first time, so serious even the gleam disappears, Dean knows it was a foolish thing to even hope for anything good.

“The only way to save the surrounding structures of mister Cassity’s brain is to conduct a surgery.”

“Surgery on his brain?” Dean says dully, feeling his whole body go numb and if Cas’s hand wasn’t still on his shoulder, he'd probably slip out of his chair and onto the floor. Right before his eyes, those drills appear again, boring into the skull with the scalp peeled off it like a banana skin.

“What kind of surgery?” Dean hears Cas say, but he doesn’t want to hear the answer, even though the both of them already know it.

Dean wants to scream instead, he wants to grab Cas and run out of the room, run so far away that everything stops to matter and the pain goes away and everything is as good as it was in those first months of shared smiles and kisses exchanged in hiding and Cas telling stories no history books dared to preserve.

But soon those times will be gone for good, even from the last place that held them precious, with a barbaric cut of a scalpel that will sever those memories and rip them to shreds and leave Cas empty. ‘Cause the hippocampus is responsible for creating and storing memories.

“We’ll need to remove the excess of the hippocampus, back to the size it should be. Then we’ll observe it to make sure it doesn’t regain its prior volume, which technically should be impossible, but I suppose not in your case.”

Dean closes his eyes and takes a deep, slow breath through the masses in his throat that seem to be suffocating him. He can hear Cas shift nearby and he concentrates on the little noises to keep himself steady. He might spew all over the floor and the doctor’s shoes and his own probably if he doesn’t shut the doc’s words out for a moment at least.

When he finally opens his eyes, his insides still threaten to spill outside with the acidic words he spits.

“You— you wanna cut out a— a piece of his brain.” God, he’s gonna puke. “A piece of his brain—do you even hear yourself?”

“I understand your concern. But partial removal of the hippocampus is not that uncommon a procedure.”

“Partia—” Dean chokes, presses his palm to his mouth just in case the bile doesn’t settle. “And if it doesn’t stop? If it keeps growing? What then?” Why does he ask things he doesn’t want an answer to?

“We can’t keep trying until it stops. At the last resort we’ll remove the whole structure to prevent its growth.”

Dean doesn’t feel like throwing up anymore. His stomach is gone, fallen into a long, black tunnel. He falls into it too. It’s airless and lightless and Dean keeps falling down and swirling like a leaf in autumn and he no longer knows which side is up or down.

It’s the grip of a shaking hand on his wrist that pulls him up and up and out of the perdition of the blackness until his feet stand in the floor firmly again and his body is concrete and so is his writhing bile.

He’s back just in time to hear the doctor explain something to Cas.

“...removed, you will still retain the memories that are stored in your cortex, so that’s a big part, but mostly childhood, young adulthood maybe.”

Dean barely manages to bite down the bitter laugh and he knows Cas is thinking about the same thing. There’s no childhood, there’s no young adulthood for Cas, there never was.

“You’ll also retain the knowledge about who you are, motoric memory, IQ—”

“But…” it’s not even a question that slips Cas’s lips. It’s an utter surrender.

“But the hippocampus is also responsible for forming new memories, so its lack—”

A salve of laughter bursts from Dean’s throat and rips through the heavy air in the room. It’s not a funny laugh, not even bitter. It’s hysterical, it’s high pitched and ragged by the spasms that jerk his insides. It’s a laughter of a madman that carries on even though Cas’s bony fingers are digging into his skin, and despite his vision of Cas’s empty face and his annihilated future.

And when the terrifying sound finally subsides, Dean’s voice is left coarse.

“It’ll fuck him up.” The words shoot out like a bullet. If only it could go straight ahead, at the doctor’s head, and never let its soundwave hit Cas and cut through him like barbed wire. “I’ve seen Memento, alright.”

It’s not just his past that they want to take away from him, not the whole of the world’s creation, not flying and Heaven. They’ll shred his future, his new potential selves, his potential, future them.

“You’re sick,” Dean snaps before either can say a thing. “This is sick. I won’t let you do it.”

“That’s why we’re leaving it for the last resort, when the partial removals fail.”

The doctor leaves with that, scared of triggering another of Dean’s outbursts.

“Dean,” Cas says again, like it’s all he can even say now and when Dean slowly raises his head, Cas’s palm just leaves his cheek, wet with Dean’s tears.

How did Dean manage to make this all about himself again? About his anger and fear of losing Cas, even if his words were wrapped in an honor protector’s banner.

“It doesn’t matter what he says, Cas, I’m taking you home. Alexia will find a way.”

“It makes so much sense, Dean, I should have thought about it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The hippocampus? Forming and storing memories? Think about it. As an angel I’ve had billions of years of memories, and believe me, I had an outstanding memory. Except for those parts ripped out from me by Naomi, I remembered everything. But angel’s mind differs completely from human’s. Angel’s minds are not physical, a human’s very much so, but it doesn’t have the capacity to store everything. For some reason, instead of getting erased, the memories decided to expand that capacity, ignoring everything around.”

“Wait, billions of years in a space designed for a hundred some?”

“Even less. A dozen maybe, older memories get pushed to the cortex, but for my brain all of those memories are brand new, being formed as they settle in, bombarding it.”

“So even if they cut out the excess, it’s gonna keep growing? And they’re gonna have to keep cutting? Until what? Until they cut it all out?”

“I think that’s the most likely scenario”

Dean pinches the ridge of his nose. “This is such bullshit.”

“Dean, my grace is running out. It’s working constantly holding back the damage. The more it works, the faster it drains. It won’t last much longer.”

And then Cas will die. They waited too fucking long, they wasted so much time because Dean stuffed him full of pills and kept his fingers crossed instead of acting right away. And because Cas—no, he can’t blame Cas for hiding the early headaches when he knows he’d have done the same.

In the end, it doesn’t matter whose fault it is, what matters is that they’re running out of time to save Cas, now that they at last have a good lead.

Still, Dean can’t help thinking that if it’s memories they’re dealing with, if they only started when Cas still had all of his grace in him—he knows there were methods, angelic methods of getting rid of those. It would be cruel and awful, putting a crown of celestial icepicks on Cas’s head—but maybe they’d had a chance.

It would kill him now, of course. Lobotomized in the best case scenario. What’s left of his grace couldn’t heal him just like it’s beginning to fail at that now.

So it’s back to the Men of Letters library.

“We’ll find something,” Dean says, though he’s beginning to lose his faith in that. Research is what he’s been doing his whole life, something that’s been saving his ass time and time again. He might not be big on going through yellow dusty pages, but it’s his thing, something he’s good at. It can’t fail Dean now, can it? “We just need time and your grace—“

“It’ll last long enough for you to find a solution.” It’s a lie and they both know it.

“But how long do we have?” And Dean could swear the way Cas’s lips form he means to say ‘hours’ but stops himself.

“Long enough,” he repeats, instead, firmly.

It will not, it cannot last long enough. But the alternative is too scary to even think about, so Dean just nods.

Then something changes on Cas’s face, his resolve fades. “But if there’s nothing—”

“There’s gotta be,” Dean cuts him off. He doesn’t want to hear Cas’s goodbyes. “I’m sure—I’m—Alexia will come up with something. Now we know what it is, she’ll find a way. If not—I’ll keep calling. I’ll find a way to help you. You hear me, Cas?”

“Of course, Dean. But if we run out of time, we should be prepared for the possibility that the surgery might be my only chance. And I can’t let that happen.”

There’s a strong shift in Cas’s voice as he says the last sentence and it sends a blow into Dean’s chest. It’s firm and determined. Dean can understand it, sure, he can’t imagine it being done to Cas either, but…

“What do you mean?”

Cas doesn’t answer. His lips press into a thin, decided line, but his eyes fall to his palms.

“Cas, if it’s the only way and you don’t take it, you’ll die.”

“They’ll be cutting out pieces of me.”

“They’ll be buying us time,” Dean corrects. He hates the idea of the doctors drilling into Cas’s brain and cutting out chunks of it. But if this is what it takes to keep Cas alive a little bit long—long enough for Dean, Sam and Alexia to find the cure, Dean will take it.

“What if what they cut out is you?”

A heavy silence falls between them. Dean gets off his chair and sits on Cas’s bed, takes Cas’s palm into both his hands.

“Hey,” he says softly, “whole millenia of existence against those five years with me? I’ll take that gamble.”

It doesn’t seem to make Cas feel better.

“What if they have to cut it all out? I didn’t stay behind to keep forgetting you. Or to forget myself.”

Dean can’t even bear to think about Cas going full Guy Pearce. “There must be some things that’ll stay behind, right? In your cortex?”

Cas only chuckles bitterly, “Something, maybe. Surely not my childhood.”

“Alright,” Dean decides, hopping off the bed and reaching to the night stand for Cas’s clothes. “I’m taking you home, Cas. We’ll take Alexia and show her our resources. She’ll find something in no time and she’ll save you.”

“Yeah, alright,” Cas says, but he doesn’t move.

“Put on your clothes and I’ll find their supply cabinet and swindle some of the good stuff for you.”

“Dean, it’s almost night, you won’t manage to get me out of here without the check out. Come back for me tomorrow. I’ll be fine. They’ve got meds and they’ll know what to do if a stronger attack starts.”

After some convincing, Dean lets Cas stay for the night. He makes sure Cas has all he needs, water, some cookies and charged telephone so he can call Dean if anything comes up.

“Just a call and I’ll be here in a minute, alright?” he promises and, with a goodnight kiss, he leaves Cas alone in his white, stiff bed and the machine beeping behind his back.


	7. Chapter 7

They’re spread across three bases. Sam in the bunker, still stubbornly trying to search the whole archives at an ultrasound speed, including their newest findings. Alexia works from her home, because she said she knows her surrounding best and can move quicker that way. The stuff in her inventory’s also obviously fresher than in theirs. She promised to make some phone calls and mix some potions.

Dean stays in a motel room, the closest one to the hospital and damn if he doesn’t feel useless. He’s got some books they grabbed on their way here, which he knew nearly by heart by now, and the internet and some old hunter pals who know nothing about how to strengthen wilting grace.

“Why would you want to strengthen it?” they all asked, surprise in their voices. “If you got some stray angel there, trust me, the weaker the better,” they went on and then, “Just go ahead and kill them, you gotta stab them with one of those short swords of theirs.”

Dean could barely stand those words, a few times he was close to driving his phone through the wall if it wasn’t for the fact he would need it if Cas called. Even closer was he to yelling at all those clueless, old men, forever stuck in their old ways of ‘if it’s supernatural I kill it.’

But of course he couldn’t say it was for the love of his life.

Angry and frustrated, having gone through the entirety of his phonebook again within two days and reaching way past tolerable calling hours, Dean gives up and turns back to the painfully bright screen of the laptop.

As he expected, the internet is of no help at all. The very first searches are a complete waste of his precious seconds and after ten pages of ‘angel+real for reals+grace+dying+for fuck’s sake+help’ which gave him nothing but some religious crap, hospices and Supernatural fanfiction which he really does not need to see right now, he finds himself with the cursor blinking in the box of a search engine unable to come up with words to type in.

He pushes himself off the desk, flips his head back and rubs at his eyes. His hand twitches for a bottle of beer that isn’t there. He needs to be sober to get to the hospital if Cas calls, but he’d give everything to get wasted and black out and not think about anything for a while.

Strengthening Cas’s grace so that it can keep healing would of course be nothing but a band-aid that would at best prolong his torment and push back the inevitable ending. But then, every day, every hour more gave them more chances at finding something that could save Cas, so even that temporary progress would be some progress.

This is unfair to just surrender Cas like that, let him be mutilated in the worst possible way. Somehow, in those past years the Winchesters always managed to find a way. Whether it was stopping Lucifer or stopping the Leviathan or closing the damned gates of Heaven and Hell. If there’s someone up there who watches over them and throws the answers their way, they should really speed it up. Or maybe they just care when it’s the world that can be saved. Why would they care when it’s just Cas and his whole being?

The cursor in the search box keeps blinking, asking Dean to finally make a choice and stop wasting time. Dean lets his eyes fall down, over the black keys, barely distinguishable in the weak light. A pale reflection mocks him from the centre of the keyboard, the little block of plastic with a capital H nearly rubbed off it. His finger hovers over it hesitantly, makes a circle on its smooth surface, before pushing it down.

The rest of the letters come easy. The search engine supplies him with a suggestion before he hits the ‘a’.

_ Hippocampus is a part of the limbic system, responsible for forming memories, learning and emotions,  _ says one of the results on the first page. There isn’t much that he learns that he hasn’t already heard from the doctor or from Cas. The loss of memory, inability to create new memories, motoric memory intact—it’s all there. There’s this guy from last century, Henry Molaison who made history by being deprived of his own. He lived a long, peaceful life of forgetting and watching the same movies over and over again.

There is nothing else there for Cas now. Nothing but the domesticated parody of Memento with a side of Dean substituting for Adam Sandler, trying every goddamn minute to win anew the love of his life that stares at him with bewildered eyes. A stranger he’s never seen in his life.

Cas is there, when Dean shuts his eyes, clenches his eyelids tight against the terrible light seeping from the screen. He’s sitting on a soft and wide armchair, tucked away in his very own room. The black and white patterns from the TV fall on his face, illuminate his gentle smile and empty eyes. And when Dean takes a glance at the screen, the same scene is trapped on it in an endless loop of saw blade and black blood on white bone and gray jelly spilling out, ripped into pieces—flash—saw blade, sliced skull, pieces of brain falling to the floor—flash—saw blade…

Dean forces his eyes to turn away, but there’s nowhere to turn away to, because there’s only Cas with his skull sliced and nothing inside. And his smile is haunting, joyful and shallow—he doesn’t even seem to notice that his brain is gone and the top of his skull lies on his lap like a bowl of popcorn. And when the black and white of his eyes turn to Dean, the smile falls into words:

“Who are you?”

Dean doesn’t know. He can’t say he’s Dean, because that means nothing. He can’t say ‘I love you,’ because that means even less. He can’t say ‘I miss you.’

“Who am I?”

And there’s one thing to that that Dean can say and when he opens his mouth the words slip away on their own.

“I wish you were dead.”

Cas smiles.

Dean’s eyes snap open. A deep shudder runs through his body, stirring him so rapidly he nearly knocks the laptop off the desk and himself off the chair. He flips the light switch on to let the yellow luminescence from the ceiling flood the room and reach to the nightmare infested corners of his mind. It doesn’t help, it never does. The light can’t scare a nightmare like this away, not when it’s coming to catch him in the reality of the daylight.

With one move Dean closes the laptop, but the pictures of cut up brains peeking at him from the screen still manage to catch on his peripheral vision. He chokes on the air he’s trying to inhale and grabs the keys on his stumbling way to the door. He needs fresh, night air to soothe his thoughts. The lock clicks once when he turns the key, a quiet sound in the empty parking lot.

He walks a few hundred feet in the chilly air enveloping his bare arms and neck, before reaching to the pocket of his jeans for his phone. He’s got himself Alexia on speed dial and he picks the number now. His steps become slower and uneven as the dial tone fills his ear.

She must have something already, how long has it been? If she hasn’t found anything by now, is there even a chance? Or maybe she decided, screw it all, and went to sleep in her Ikea bed like she doesn’t owe them nothing—because she doesn’t.

“What happened?” the woman’s voice greets him, drowsy, but on the side of having just yawned not to fall asleep at nearly five am rather than the ‘fuck you all, I’m sleeping.’

“Nothin’, just wondering if you’ve got something yet.”

She hesitates for a second before she answers.

“Told you I’d call if I do.”

Dean stops his trek. For a moment he hopes there will be a but, that a note of a smile will seep into her voice as she tells him she was about to call. There’s silence.

With his thumb and index fingers, Dean pinches the bridge of his nose.

“Yeah, I know.”

Silence again.

Dean doesn’t move as a lonely car passes him by, he doesn’t say anything and maybe Alexia disconnected the call already. He still keeps the phone pressed tightly to his ear in a search for the smallest noises from the other side.

He wishes desperately he hadn’t chosen the damned seclusion of the hotel room for a fifteen minute headstart on his way to Cas. If Cas calls. If he doesn’t—that’s good. It means he slept safely through the night. He closed his eyes in the evening and when he opens them up again, Dean will be there already to take him away. He’ll take him home, even if Alexia doesn’t find anything. He’ll keep pushing the needle through the tender and all red skin on the inside of his elbow and pour the painkiller into his bloodstream. Then he’ll watch him moan in pain as his body ceases to respond to the drug. He’ll watch him scream as the last remnants of grace expire like red embers turning to charcoal.

Then he’ll watch Cas d—

“They’ll fuck him up,” he says finally, his voice cracked.

“I know.”

“They’ll fucking fuck him up,” he repeats, like the mantra can absolve him of the choice he’s made for Cas.

Maybe he should let Cas make that choice. That’s what this all has always been about, after all. Cas’s choice.

“Dean,” Alexia mutters. “Go to bed. Sam and I are working on it, you need to be awake tomorrow to be with Cas.”

“Yeah, I’ll… okay.”

He doesn’t plan to sleep. He wouldn’t fall asleep even if he wanted to. He leaves the light on when he lies in bed without even taking his clothes off. The alarm on his phone is set to seven in the morning, in case he dozes off after all.

He closes his eyes and lets the warmth of the room engulf him. Maybe, just maybe he could take the tiniest nap.

The nap turns into heavy sleep—the stress of the day, all those restless nights took their toll on him. He had to sleep for hours because when he wakes up, the sun is already up outside his windows, though still pale and pinkish. He vaguely remembers his phone buzzing, now he reaches for it, slightly panicked.

There are ten unanswered calls from Cas and Dean’s hard begins to hammer in his chest. The newest one was an hour ago. And then, there’s a text message.

_ I’m glad you’re sleeping. I had two seizures at night and my grace won’t stand another one. I signed the consent form for the surgery. _

Dean springs up to his feet, puts on his shoes barely even stopping. With a phone pressed to his ear, he runs out of the motel room and into his car.

“Come on, Cas. Come on,” he says to the dial tone in the speaker.

But there’s no answer.

Dean’s thumping footsteps echo across the still quiet stairway as he sprints up two stairs at a time. His pounding heart struggles to spur out of his chest and he knows it’s not because of the physical strain. He counts the floors—two, three, four—then turns left.

Please, don’t be too late, please, don’t be too late—a frantic mantra ricochets around his skull, seeding out any other thought.

It was easier to view the surgery as the good thing, the saving thing, when it was just a looming phantom, still far away—the last resort. But now the last resort is here, and now the reality of it had time to sink in. And Dean’s scared, more scared than he’s been since it all started.

An angered voice calls after him, the nurse he’s just passed by. She wants him to stop and leave. There’s no running on the ward, she says, and it’s long till visiting hours. But he doesn’t so much as slow down until he reaches the door at the very end of the corridor. The white wood of the closed door stops him, finally, allows him a bunch of sharp breaths, as his palm hovers over the doorknob.

It can only go two ways, when he enters, with Cas’s sleepyhead still resting safely on his pillow or with the unambiguity of an empty bed. It takes Dean a few more inhales to press the knob and break the bubble of Cas’s Schrödinger’s brain.

He pushes the door open, eyes falling on Cas’s bed except… Cas isn’t on it. He’s not there. The bed is empty, the bed sheets messy, like he just left there, not yet cleaned and changed and folded neatly waiting for another patient, which, of course they didn’t yet have time for it. Dean just talked to Cas, he just heard his voice. They must have taken him and it’s all too late and Dean’s about to fly out of the room to stop them, even if it means bursting into the surgery.

But then Cas’s roommate says, “A blonde woman was here, I think she was helping him to the bathroom.”

That’s a relief. Dean rushes to the bathroom.

He finds them easily. Cas sitting in the wheelchair, Alexia standing behind him and chanting something in an ancient language. And Dean doesn’t like how much this resembles what happened before, Alexia’s examination that landed Cas in the hospital bed in the first place.

It’s hard to trust her with Cas but ever since she’s been doing everything she could to find a way to save him, Dean knows. Mostly out of the guilt, sure, but that still counts. She wouldn’t be risking Cas’s life again, would she?

“What’s going on?” he asks, voice hushed not to disturb whatever this is.

She still shushes him and tips her head at the phone lying on the counter.

Dean picks up the phone and brings up the latest used app, it’s an email. From Sam. There’s a picture of an old parchment attached, something that looks Enochian on it.

A little calmed down by the fact it’s something Sam found, because Dean trusts Sam, Dean waits patiently for Alexia to finish. He doesn’t take his eyes off Cas’s for even a moment, though. He watches him for the slightest tick of pain on his face, but for the first time in a long time, Cas looks peaceful, at least while still conscious.

Alexia finishes and a soft light surrounds Cas’s head and then she pulls away from him.

“Cas?”

Cas looks at Dean and his eyes seem so clear. And he smiles.

“I feel good,” he says.

“Did—did you cure him?” Dean says unable to hide the hope in his voice. Only to have it crushed.

“No, I’m sorry. I did buy him some time. I managed to strengthen what was left of his grace but it’s not enough to hold for long. He got maybe an extra day.”

Of fucking course.

Dean lets out a disappointed smile but then gathers his composure. There’s no time to waste.

“Okay. Thank you, that’s something. And you,” Dean points at Cas, “I’m taking you home. What the hell were you thinking signing those papers?”

“Dean—”

Dean shakes his head and runs the tips of his fingers through Cas’s hair. It doesn’t matter that Cas signed the papers. He’s not staying here another minute longer. They got an extra day and Dean is taking Cas home.

They’ll find a way to save him, they have to. After all, what Alexia just did seemed impossible just an hour ago, and yet here they are. It fills Dean with a newfound hope that Cas and his brain and his memory can still be saved.


	8. Chapter 8

They have to put in some work to smuggle Cas out of the hospital at that early an hour and without a check out but of course they manage. They get to the car and Dean hesitates. He pulls out the keys.

“Can you drive?”

Alexia raises her eyebrows at him. “Sure,” she answers.

Dean tosses her the keys. He doesn’t wanna waste two hours staring at the road with Cas sitting on the passenger seat.

He slips into the backseat after helping Cas in. He’s feeling better but he’s still weak after the whole ordeal. They ride home with Cas in Dean’s arms, secured and safe. Cas is visibly relaxed now, free of pain and, for a moment, free of worry, too. They have a little chit chat as they ride, Cas’s voice stronger than before, his lips curled up in a smile. For a while all feels so good, just like it used to be before this special hell flavor of shit hit the fan. And for a while Dean lets himself forget that it won’t last forever. That they only bought him a little more time, that he’s not cured.

That he’s still dying.

As a tear rolls down Dean’s cheek, he couldn’t hold back, he buries it in Cas’s hair, as he softly presses a kiss to the top of his head afraid that anything more than that could send him into catatonia again. Luckily, they make it to the bunker without any issues.

Dean is glad that he got some rest, in the end. Now, he can start looking for the cure with triple the energy and a little more faith. It’s more of the same books, but at least now they know what topics to be looking for. And Sam went through a lot of the books on his own the previous day, so some volumes are still thrown in different corners of the library, half-read.

The only breaks Dean takes are for coffee refills and for glancing at Cas dozing off on the armchair, the tea in the cup sitting on the table beside him has completely gone cold. He stubbornly wanted to help, but his tumultuous, seizure-filled night left him too exhausted, even if the pain was gone. Still Dean can’t help checking in on him every now and then, watching his chest rise and fall just to make sure he’s still only sleeping.

“You need to eat something,” Sam says, sliding the pizza box in Dean’s direction.

The hot pizza smells amazing, but Dean’s sure he won’t be able to push even a bite past his clenched throat. Besides, there’s no time and he can’t exactly be leafing through ancient, precious books with his fingers covered in tomato sauce.

“Maybe later,” he says, though his rumbling stomach protests. He pushes the box away and gets back to reading.

“Come on, man, when was the last time you ate?”

Dean really doesn’t have time for this game. The minutes keep ticking by, turning into hours, and they’re still not any closer to saving Cas. So he just shrugs and, luckily, Sam lets it go.

But there’s still something on Sam’s mind. He doesn’t stop staring at Dean, instead of staring at his book, and he keeps making those small, annoying noises like he’s trying to say something.

“What?”

He looks up at Sam only to find the weird mix or sadness and nerves on his face he hasn’t seen him wear once since this whole thing started. He better not be trying to pluck the cord on this, telling Dean what is and isn’t possible, because the clock is still ticking, Cas’s chest keeps rising and falling.

“Listen, there’s something that I and Alexia found yesterday,” he begins.

Dean blinks, not yet sure which word he should be hung up on: found or yesterday, and most of all, why the hell is Sam looking at him like he’s bearing all bad news and none of the good news.

“Spit it out.”

“The research on angels and heaven wasn’t bringing anything useful and I realized that was not the only place we could look, ‘cause there’s so much more—”

“Like?”

“Remember the cyclopes? Odyssey, Greek Mythology. Hades,” he adds with emphasis, while Dean keeps staring at him expectantly.

“The god or the—”

“The land of the dead,” Alexia supplies, wiping the pizza grease off her fingers. “The underworld and its rivers.”

“We’re not hauling Cas’s ass across Styx.” Dean would really rather not be talking about anything concerning the dead. “We’re aiming for the opposite, here.”

“More like Lethe.”

“Lethe,” Dean echoes. “What’s that one do?”

“Lethe is the river of forgetting,” Sam says. “Those who drink from it lose their memories.”

Things begin falling into place even before Alexia rushes to explain that deleting Cas’s memories would stop the hippocampus from growing. That’s the good news. That can save Cas and if they do it while his grace is still strong enough, it could cure the damage that’s already then.

So if it’s a good news—great news, then why are they still looking at Dean with all their compassion and misery? And why is Dean’s heart pounding in his head like he already knows what he’s not yet letting himself to formulate?

“Okay, so—so we scrape off about a millennium or two of his memories and—” Dean begins, like he can speak his version into existence, like if he doesn’t let Sam speak, his words won’t be the truth.

“We can’t pick and choose,” Sam says, his voice small. “The water of Lethe, it will...it will erase everything.”

Everything. It’s less like a punch, more like a bucket of cold water and for a moment, Dean can’t even speak, all words gone, all thoughts replaced by one: Cas will be gone. This isn’t fixing anything.

“And how is that better than what the doctor came up with?” he asks, at last, voice weak.

“He’ll still be able to form new memories. He’ll be less Memento and more Jason Bourne. And it’s safer.”

Dean knows it, knows how it’s better, even before Sam gives him the answer, but a part of him is trying so hard to hold onto frustration and excuses and anything that isn’t falling apart at the idea. How can Sam even be proposing it? They were supposed to be looking for a way to fix Cas, not to destroy him.

“So to save Cas’s life we have to… erase Cas?”

Sam only nods.

“Can it be reversed?” Dean asks. “Like if we find another way later, can we—”

“I’m sorry, Dean.” Sam looks at Dean, heartbroken. “That is why we kept on looking. That is why you and Alexia will keep looking.”

“And you?”

“I’m going to meet the seller.”

“The seller?”

“Yeah, some guy trading in powerful items. He’s gonna give me some water from Lethe in exchange for an obscure book he has been looking for that we’ve got two copies of anyway. I already made sure it’s not cursed or anything,” Sam explains. That’s when Dean sees it. A book-shaped wrapping lying on the edge of the table. He really hasn’t been paying attention to anything outside his research and Cas. “As the last resort, okay?”

What choice does Dean have? It’s not even his choice to make. His eyes drift to Cas, who’s stirring softly in his armchair. He should be waking up soon.

“How the hell do I tell him about it?”

Sam doesn’t look at Dean when he says, “He already knows.”

“What? So I’m the last one to find out?”

“Alexia told him in the hospital but we didn’t wanna give you hope until we actually knew we could get our hands on the water of Lethe.”

But it’s just the last resort, Dean tells himself. Until then, Dean’s gonna find something else, something less radical that will fix Cas, really fix Cas instead of taking him away. Still he can’t stop wondering, what it would be like to have Cas open his eyes and not know who Dean is. Not knowing who he is or remembering his own name. A blank canvas. And all their shared memories, all the history of time, gona just like that.

And he thought it was hard the last time someone he loved looked at him without any recognition in their eyes. First Lisa and Ben, then… well, then Cas. But back then, back when in front of Dean stood a man calling himself Emmanuel, it wasn’t forever. But when he got Cas back, how easy it was for Dean to forget what he felt then, how much he preferred having Cas with his memories gone as long as he was alive and well. He’s already lost Cas way too many times.

Once Sam is gone and Alexia moves with a pile of books to one of the free rooms, Dean makes Cas a cup of hot tea and sets it on the table. He sits down on the armrest and reaches to Cas’s forehead to brush away his bangs. A touch so light is not enough to wake Cas up this time.

“Wake up, sleepyhead,” Dean says, sliding his fingers down Cas’s face, caressing his scruffy jaw.

If he knew Cas would sleep so long, he’d have put his foot down and sent Cas to bed, despite his protests. Now it makes more sense, Cas didn’t want to spend what could be his last day alone in their room. He wanted to stay with them, stay with Dean, for as long as he could, until he couldn’t keep his eyes open anymore.

Now his eyes are open wide, a little panic clear in them. “How long was I asleep?”

“A few hours,” Dean says. “It’s still early. How are you feeling?”

“Very good.” He’s smiling softly and Dean’s got no reason to doubt him. “Tea?”

Dean hands Cas his cup. “We got pizza, too. It’s still warm, you should eat some.”

“Sounds good,” Cas says but as Dean moves to bring him a slice, Cas catches his wrist to stop him. “Dean, there’s something—”

“I know,” Dean cuts him off. “Sam told me.”

He doesn’t really wanna talk about it now. It doesn’t matter, they’re not doing it. He’s just gonna bring Cas his pizza slice and then he’ll go back to research and he’ll find the proper cure.

Cas has a different idea, though. He follows Dean to the table like a puppy. He can get his own damn pizza, then.

“Dean, we should talk.”

“It’s fine, I’m still on it, see?” Dean lifts the heavy book to show Cas he’s working and is not gonna give up.

“Dean, please, look at me,” Cas says, firmly.

And Dean does, he looks at Cas, the calmness on his face, the love in his eyes.

“There’s still time, Cas,” Dean says—pleads almost.

“There is,” Cas agrees. “And I want to spend that time with you. Please, just come with me.”

How can Cas be asking him to just let him go? To let him forget everything. To lose everything that he is. How can Dean just give up? Even if he knows it’s pointless.

“Yesterday, you were worried about losing even a part of your memories. What this will do—”

“Yesterday,” Cas cuts in, “I was afraid. Of the surgery, of the unknown. But now—”

“Now you wanna give up?”

“Now I know I don’t have to be afraid as long as you’re with me.”

Dean swallows hard. Cas doesn’t get to be so corny while telling Dean he’ll lose him.

And then Cas adds, “‘Cause you’re gonna be with me, right? Even when I—”

“Of course, Cas.” How dare Cas doubt him? “I’ll take care of you if this is the only way. But it can’t be.”

“Whether it’s Lethe or something else, erasing my memories is the only sure-fire way to stop this from happening.”

“Not all of them.”

Cas takes a step forward, lands his hand on Dean’s cheek. There’s so much sadness painted on his face, but there’s also something else. Peace. “I’ll be alive. It won’t be the end of my story. Our story.”

Everything inside Dean wants to protest. No, he can’t give up on Cas, he can’t, he can’t. There’s still time. Hours. Maybe a dozen of them if they’re lucky. As Cas is right now, it’s so easy to believe that maybe it could last for days. Maybe Dean could keep reading and calling and digging through this whole fucking bunker, catch every monster and pagan god that could have any answers, he’s bring back the angels, bring back hell if he had to—if that could help.

But the books just keep coming and they already found some answers. Can they get any more lucky than this? Just because Dean doesn’t like it, it doesn’t mean they don’t already have the solution. Sam should be back with it in a few hours.

There’s only so much time that they have left to spend together. Their last day. Cas is right, if this is it—and this  _ is  _ it, no matter how much Dean refuses to accept it—then why waste it. Why not try to make the most of it, why not try to etch every millisecond of it into Dean’s mind so that he can replay it like a movie, relive it again and again once Cas is gone?

“Okay,” Dean says, barely above a whisper. “Okay, let’s do that.” It’s hard, but Dean musters a smile, as he slumps down into his chair and pushes the book away. “Now eat your damn pizza.”

There is nothing specific that Cas wants to do, no speedrun through his bucket list—he’s not dying, after all. He’s only forgetting.

So they just are, together, enjoying the company, talking, cuddling, making slow, tender love. All the while Dean feels like he’s about to fall apart. He’s gonna lose Cas. He’s gonna lose all that they’ve built together. In a few hours, Cas is gonna be just another stranger wearing his face.

“There’s one good thing in all of this,” Cas says against Dean’s lips and doesn’t give Dean a chance to guess. “That one day I’ll get to kiss you for the first time, again.”

Dean lets out a chuckle. “If you’ll even want to kiss me again.”

Cas props himself on his elbow to take a good look at Dean. “What do you mean?”

He’s got such an innocent look on his face as he asks this, as if Dean was being completely unreasonable. But he’s looking at the unknown here, too. He’s not losing as much as Cas, but in a way, he’s losing more. He’s losing Cas. And after all, he will be just another stranger to Cas as well. With all their history gone, with all that brought them together: the apocalypse, the fight, the betrayal and death. He’s gonna mean nothing to Cas.

“What if you don’t even like the next time we meet?” he asks in a quiet voice.

How can he be thinking about himself? He’ll take care of Cas whether or not Cas ever chooses to love him. Because this isn’t about them, their little love story. It’s about Cas’s life, his safety, him finding his personality again. It’s about Cas making new memories and Dean will be lucky if those memories include him, but he can’t demand it.

“How could I not, Dean?” Cas says, his hand grazing along Dean’s jaw. “You’re the best man that I know. So beautiful inside and out. So bright and funny—even if I don’t get your references half the time,” he adds with a stupid smirk. “I will love you. It might take some time, but I know I will.”

Dean’s face is burning and he’s trying his damndest not to shift uncomfortably with Cas’s body pressed along him. Is it because of Cas’s words? Or because of the word?

Dean’s thought about Cas as the love of his life for so long now, but why only when he was about to lose him? Why only in his head and not out loud, never out loud?

He finds Cas’s hand and links their fingers. He pulls their joined palms to his bare chest.

“I won’t stop loving you for a second,” he says and the word slips out so easily from his mouth. How could he have waited so long to say it? “I love you, Cas.” He never wants to stop saying it now. “I love you.”

“I love you too, Dean. Have for so long. I hate to lose that but I swear—”

“I know,” Dean cuts him off. He doesn’t need Cas to swear anything. He just needs him to come back to him. He just needs him to be. “It’ll be okay.”

“Yeah,” Cas says, lying down in Dean’s embrace. His body fits there like it was made for it. It’s the last time they can lie there like that. No, not the last time—only last time for a while. His place will always be here, as soon as he’s ready for it again. “It’ll be okay.”

Dean isn’t sure what he expected the water of Lethe to look like. Maybe ink black like the hole that it’s gonna leave in their lives. Twirling, foul goo that will take and take until there’s nothing left of Cas but his body. But the content of the vial, small and with an ornate plug, looks just like water. Translucent, colorless, no ominous afterglow, no miraculous shimmer. It could be tap water just as well.

“Are you sure this is the real deal and we didn’t get screwed over?” Dean asks Sam.

He came back a few hours ago and has still been trying to look for other ways since. Cas was right, there is nothing else that could be done, complete oblivion is the only way to save Cas.

“The guy seemed like a real deal, ex-hunter turned collector. But I guess we won’t know until it’s done.”

Done. What a small word to describe Dean’s own heart getting ripped out of his chest.

“So I just drink it and that’s it?” Cas asks.

Dean’s eyes jump from Sam to Cas and back to Sam again. There’s a distance between him and the two, as if there was a thick wall of glass separating there, even though the warmth of Cas’s thigh is pressed alongside his. It has to be a dream, one he can’t wake up from. This is it, it’s happening right now and his head can’t catch up.

He’s about to lose Cas, this Cas, forever.

That’s it.

“Yeah,” Sam says, handing the vial to Cas. “As far as I know, you won’t feel a thing. You’ll just fall asleep and when you wake up—”

“—I’ll be confused as fuck.”

The curse in Cas’s mouth snaps him back to reality as his eyes widen at him. He can’t help a small smile at the sound, but it falls quickly. How long will it take him to teach Cas to swear again? Or will they come naturally once Cas loses his sanctimonious background.

“Pretty much.”

There’s an ache on Sam’s face. He already said his goodbyes to Cas, a little earlier. Dean didn’t want to intrude. In all of this, he almost forgot that Sam will be losing Cas too, losing a good friend. They’re both gonna miss Cas like hell. But they’re also both be there for him as he builds himself back up.

Then, with one last glance, one last goodbye, Sam leaves them to it and joins Alexia in the library.

“So, this is it,” Dean says in a small voice. Again with those simple, meaningless words.

“This is it,” Cas says, unplugging the vial.

He lifts it up and Dean has to roll his hand to a fist to stop himself from swatting the vial out of Cas’s hand. But Cas only brings it to his nose to sniff it. His face remains neutral—if Dean were to guess, the thing has no smell or taste either.

“Dean, there is so much more that I wanted to tell you,” he begins, his free hand curled inside Dean’s. “I always thought we’d have so much more time.”

“We will,” Dean promises, though it must sound hollow to Cas. He won’t be this Cas anymore, will it? Same body, same mind, a whole new person. Cas is about to lose himself, wipe out his own existence—who he was a billion years ago, who he is now. “We’ll have our whole lives.”

Cas nods, slowly. His eyes are wide, desperate as they stare right into Dean’s.

“Will you tell me our story? The good and the bad?”

The damp strands of Cas’s hair have fallen to his forehead again and Dean can’t stop himself from reaching to it one last time, pushing it back. Then he leans forward to press the gentlest kiss to Cas’s temple, making sure he doesn’t cause the pain that’s been growing in his head to rise.

“Every moment of it,” Dean says. “It’s the best story that I know.”

“I know it’ll be my favorite.”

Cas has to be the brave one, here, breaking apart from Dean and pulling himself up on the bed. If it was Dean’s choice, he would never know how to let him go.

He’s freshly showered and dressed in comfortable clothes. How else to start a whole new life? He slips under the sheets and, with his free hand, puffs the pillows up to make sure he’s comfortable.

“I love you,” is the last thing Cas says to Dean before the pain gets too heavy and Dean has to help Cas drink the water. Dean can only hope it’s not too late and that with stalling they didn’t cause any permanent damage to Cas’s brain.

He slides down on the mattress, head on Dean’s pillow. Ready to fall asleep for the last time as the person he is right now.

“I love you too. I love you so much,” Dean says, as Cas blinks time after time, trying to keep his eyes open for as long as possible, watch Dean’s face for as long as he can. “I’ll always love you, every version of you.”

Dean’s holding Cas’s hand the whole time as the water of Lethe takes him away.

He doesn’t let go until Sam comes back to the room. He only pulls away because they can’t have Cas waking up with his hand in a hand of a complete stranger. He’ll be confused enough as it is.

It’ll have to be enough to watch Cas’s chest rise and fall.

“How long is he gonna be sleeping?” Dean asks Sam because it feels like forever and what if he dropped into a coma? What if it wasn’t Lethe but poison, what if they killed Cas after all or if his brain got smooshed from the tension?

“The books said it might take a few hours,” Sam calms him down. “I thought I told you that.”

He did, at least Dean thinks he did. It doesn’t matter—how is Dean supposed to wait so long? “Oh, okay.”

“You should take a nap, too. You’re no good to him like this.”

“I’m fine,” Dean says. He’s not tired at all. He feels like he’s halfway outside of his body with the other half staying perfectly alert to every tiniest movement on Cas’s face. Is he dreaming out his life while it bit by bit seeps away like Eternal Sunshine? “I’ll just grab a coffee and be good as new.” He kinda regrets the choice of words right away.

He never does grab that coffee. He just stays there in the chair, taking vigil, waiting. As he’s trying to push down the heavy feeling of loss, he’s trying to look forward. Dean can’t help imagining what it’ll be like when Cas wakes up. What his first words will be, if he’ll be at peace or scared or angry and frustrated.

What should Dean tell him? Everything’s fine? Your name is Cas? I’m Dean and I love you?—No, of course not.

“And one more thing,” Sam says as he drops by. He hands Dean a thumbdrive. “It’s for you.”

“What’s this? A bootleg of Total Recall?”

“Cas recorded it. One for you, one for himself.”

“I don't need this,” Dean says. What could Cas possibly record for him that he couldn't tell him into his face before he—”We already said our goodbyes."

"I don't know what it is, Dean. But he wanted you to watch it when you miss him too much."

Dean lets out a mirthless chuckle. He already misses him. Though he knows each day he'll miss him more when he has to keep looking at the face of a stranger who doesn't remember Dean. When will Dean know when it’s too much?

Dean takes the thumbdrive wordlessly and slides it into the drawer of his nightstand to keep it safe. And to keep it away from his eyes. Because with Cas right here, when he can still pretend nothing has changed, Dean already wants to play it just to know. But he can’t. It’s the last thing of the old Cas he will ever have and he can’t just waste it so soon. However long he can stand it.


	9. Chapter 9

It’s been hours, and though Dean’s eyes kept shutting on their own, head lolling forward and snapping him out of the accidental slumber, Dean never let himself really nap. He had to be watchful. Any moment Cas could wake up. Dean had to be there for it.

He moved away from the bed to the small sofa by the wall so that he doesn’t hover right over the bed as much as he’d love to. He doesn’t dare reach to wipe away the hair from Cas’s forehead, no matter how much his fingers itch for it, as the ends of the bangs rest on Cas’s eyelashes.

He wants to touch him, wants to hold him one last time while he can—but he can’t; this is not his Cas anymore. It’s a whole different person, for now, at least. Dean has to remind himself they’ll get there eventually. He has to believe it. He made Cas fall in love with him once before.

Cas shifts in the bed, for the first time since he went under. His head wriggles on the pillow, looking for just a little more comfort before the day begins for him. Then he opens his eyes, slowly, blinks at the ceiling.

Dean holds his breath, keeps so still he could blend into the surroundings. He watches Cas’s every movement, as if he could read anything from it, guess what’s going on in his head.

Cas keeps lying on his back. He doesn’t look around. Instead, he moves his focus to himself, his own body. He touches the sheets, first, looking almost mesmerized with the way his palm moves. He slides it along his covered torso then brings it up to his face. He bends his fingers one by one, brow furrowed.

He lifts his other hand and repeats the motions of his fingers.

Then, he smiles.

Dean watches it with slight confusion. Cas’s body was always there. Though the injury threatened his mobility, he never lost it. He doesn’t even remember it was ever a possibility.

He doesn’t get to muse on that farther, as Cas begins to lift and turn to get off the bed. That’s when his eyes fall on Dean.

“What—Where am I?” he asks, jolting back and clutching the sheet to his chest as if he was naked underneath. His eyes are so wide as they stare at Dean with fear.

Dean’s trying not to let that gaze break his heart any further.

"Easy, easy, you're safe,” Dean says, slowly raising his palms up, as if he was talking to a wild, wounded animal. “Let me explain. My name is Dean Winchester—"

Something else appears in Cas’s eyes. Confusion, yes. But there’s more than that.

"I know who you are," Cas says and it sounds like an accusation.

Now, it’s Dean who’s confused. How could he possibly know who Dean is? Did water of Lethe not work and is Cas still dying? He doesn’t seem to be in pain, not yet, at least.

Or did it work better than any of them expected and left some of Cas intact. He wasn’t supposed to remember anything from his life. Though if, on an off-chance, one thing stuck with him, out of the millennia of memories, how could it be him? When is Dean ever that lucky?

But these aren’t the eyes of Cas when he looked at Dean. He could never look at him like this.

"You know me? Cas?" Dean tests, a careful smile breaking on his lips. "What else do you remember?"

"Cas?" Cas echoes the name. "Castiel? He– he's not here." Dean's stomach turns before the words leave Cas's mouth. It feels like a déjà vu, a horrid, twisted sort of déjà vu, when Cas looks him straight in the eye and says, "I'm Jimmy. Jimmy Novak."

The kitchen goes quiet as the recording plays out. They barely managed to convince Cas, or Jimmy or… whoever, to sit down and watch it. He was at the door already, just as he stood with no jacket, with no baggage or money, ready to hitch-hike the entire way to Illinois, or trek if he had to.

Dean’s heart ached the entire time he had to listen to Cas’s voice on the video. But it didn’t seem to make much of an impression on the guy.

"I don't know what kind of trick you're trying to pull here, or what you're trying to accomplish,” he says, slowly, with a forced composure. “I am not Cas. I’m Ji—"

"You are Cas," Dean says firmly. He refuses to so much as acknowledge Cas could be anything else than that. "I don't understand what happened here, but you're not Jimmy Novak. Jimmy is gone, he's in heaven."

"No, you listen to me," Cas says. "Cas is gone. My name is James Novak, his vessel. And I demand to be let out. I remember you two. I remember what you and Castiel did to my family. And now—where are we, is this a bunker or something?” He lifts his hands in annoyance. “Are you gonna tell me it was all for nothing and you screwed it up and the world is gone?"

For just a split second Dean wants to tell him yes. Yes, the world has ended, this bunker is all there is. Because if he can keep him here for as long as he can, on an awful lie about the radioactive world outside, maybe he'll manage to convince him, he's not Jimmy. He's Cas.

He wouldn't say that. He probably wouldn't. He won't know because Sam beats him to it.

"No, of course not. We saved the world. Thanks to you. And Cas—" Sam adds and Dean wants to punch him. How dare he? How can he imply that this isn't Cas? It's just the wrong set of memories. Doesn't make Cas not Cas. And it definitely doesn't make Cas Jimmy Novak.

"Great. So you don't need me anymore. So I'm leaving.”

And it's something about this choice of words coming from Cas's mouth. You don't need me. What a lie. Of course they need him. Dean needs him. He needs Cas.

“No, you’re not,” Dean says harshly. He was never supposed to talk to Cas like this. But there’s an impostor sitting in front of him, wearing Cas’s face and hijacking his body.

“Just—just give us a little time, Jimmy,” Sam says in his calm, diplomatic voice. “We just need to figure out what happened here. A couple days, okay?”

Cas throws his hands up in annoyance. “I’m supposed to wait until your buddy comes back so that you can stuff him inside me again?”

“No, Cas is gone,” Sam says while Dean’s boiling on the inside. “He’s not coming back.”

“I’m having a hard time feeling sorry.”

Sam has to kick Dean under the table to stop him from saying some ugly words that really wouldn’t help their cause. Dean has felt for the guy, the real Jimmy Novak since he met him. Used by the angels—by Cas—taken away from his family and killed when Cas’s body disintegrated. If this really was Jimmy, Dean would know how to sympathise.

But it’s not Jimmy. Jimmy is in heaven, that Dean knows for a fact. And heaven is closed and he couldn’t have come back to his body just because Cas’s memories went away.

“We’ll help you out afterwards,” Sam keeps going. The only reason Dean doesn’t protest is that they’ve gotta fix this before they have to help him steal Cas away. “Money, clothes, transport, whatever you need.”

Cas considers his offer for a moment. He knows damn well he’s got nowhere to go, anyway. Jimmy’s family won’t take him in after all this time, will it?

He lets out a disgruntled sigh. “Can I at least get some coffee?”

Instead of an answer, Dean waves his hand towards the pot. The coffee’s hot, he can serve himself and Dean needs to have a word with Sam.

“What the hell is going on? Jimmy Novak?”

“Cas had to still have his memories,” Sam offers, but that’s not the part that Dean doesn’t get. “Now that Cas is gone—”

“But how?” Cas was supposed to be a blank canvas. No memories at all. Not this. How is Dean supposed to begin to work with him if he’s stubbornly claiming he’s Jimmy Novak and he hates Dean’s guts? “Why didn’t Lethe erase everything?

"I was thinking about it. My guess is Lethe could tell where Cas ended and Jimmy began," Sam says like some sort of buddha. "And it only took Cas."

This is bullshit. One brain, all of memory, gone—that had been the promise. It had felt like a sentence just a few hours ago. Now it feels like a promised blessing that got stolen from them.

"There is no Jimmy, Sam!” Dean can barely keep his voice hushed. Just across the room, Cas is going through the cabinets in search of a mug and sugar and what-not. “Jimmy's gone. If those are just some leftover memories, then that's not who he is.” Dean can barely wrap his mind around it and every second the situation dawns deeper and deeper on him, the more he feels like he won’t keep it together. “And Lethe is just water, it couldn't tell anything from anything."

"Okay but listen, Dean,” Sam says, leaning towards him like he’s gonna reveal some secret of the universe to him, “who we are right now is highly decided by our memories. So if all there is left in Cas’s head are Jimmy's memories, he truly believes that's who he is. It's what shaped him."

Dean bites his lip, watching Cas’s back as he pours the coffee. He couldn’t tell the two by their movements if he tried. That old, angelic stiffness that never fully left Cas’s spine, even after the fall, is still there.

Why does it always have to be something? Always some cruel twist of fate, as if Lethe didn’t take enough from Dean already. It was supposed to take it all. Maybe it still could.

"Hm,” Dean mutters, a new idea popping into his head. “What if we—"

"Dean—" Sam warns before Dean can even share his plan. As if he knew.

"What if we get more of that Lethe,” Dean continues nevertheless, “and convince him to drink it and erase Jimmy to get the blank slate we were supposed to get?"

Sam fixes him with his ugliest glare. Like Dean’s immoral for even speaking out.

"It's Lethe, not the Mississippi river, Dean. We can't just stroll into Hades and grab a pint."

"We've done tougher things."

"It wouldn't be right, Dean.” There it is. The morality of it. But how is this better? “We can't erase a person and their memories just because we don't like who they are."

"That's not who he is," Dean protests. It was Jimmy who was trying to erase Cas and take his place. To erase even the idea of Cas. Even though he was still bearing Cas’s soul.

Dean wants to scream “That’s not Jimmy” at the top of his lungs for someone, anyone to listen. For one of the people in charge whose idea it was—God, the Fates, whoever makes this shit up. It’s unfair. It was unfair to make them erase Cas but it’s so much more unfair to be undoing him, at the very beginning of his new life. Dean promised him time, he promised he’d take care of him. And he failed him. He can’t take care of him now.

And Sam’s still being this calm, infuriating self, trying to explain it all away.

"What if it's the universe's way of making it up to the Novaks?"

Dean snorts. What else does he have left to do? He’ll crumble later, in his and Cas’s room, though he can feel the sob constantly building up in his chest.

"Well, then that's fucking twisted. Are we supposed to let Cas get back to Jimmy's family and pretend he's that little girl's daddy?"

Sam shakes his head. “I don’t know,” he says, resigned. “I don’t know, Dean.”

Dean purses his lips. What a fucking productive town hall meeting it was. "Awesome."

It’s still Cas, Dean knows. Dean knows because when he returns to the table, it’s Cas’s wing-cup that he’s holding in his hand. The picture is right ‘cause it’s the hand in which the cup belongs. But it feels so wrong. Because it’s not Cas that’s holding it.

But that’s the cup that he chose. Out of every cup in the cabinet, he picked the one with an angel wing, a symbol of those that he hates.

Dean can’t stop staring. There’s Sam’s hand on his forearm, gripping it tight. As if he was worried Dean would throw himself at Cas for daring to touch the cup.

And he wants to, a little. He wants to yell at the guy, make him put it back. But he’s only watching.

“So, what exactly do you want to do to me?” Cas asks. Not even his voice is right. Low, throaty. It’s Cas and Dean wants to scream.

“We’re not sure, yet,” Sam says. “Can you tell us what’s the last thing you remember?”

“Before waking up here?” Cas takes a sip from the cup and flinches at the burn on his tongue. “I was on the floor, bleeding. It hurt so much. And my baby, Claire was standing before me—”

Dean remembers. He remembers that day, those words he said to Cas. Take me. Jimmy, once again, sacrificing himself, this time for his family not for his faith.

He keeps going on about Castiel possessing Claire and about begging Cas to take him. But Dean isn’t paying attention. His eyes are fixed on the motion of Cas’s finger as it slides up and down the curves of the porcelain wing, all the way to where it meets the table and back up to the edge of the cup.

Dean pokes Sam’s elbow to show him.

It’s Cas. It’s still him. It’s his muscle memory. The one part of Cas that Lethe couldn’t take away.

But it’s also not Cas no matter how much Dean refuses to believe it.

So say the big, round tears streaming down his cheeks as he keeps talking about his little girl, about his wife. The table becomes his confessional as he spits out all of his regrets and how his faith screwed him over and maybe in that Dean could hear Cas, as well, but somehow there’s not an ounce of Cas in his words.

He’s so much more than those distant memories. Four years and they have not faded. They’re as alive in him as if his life happened yesterday; walking with his family to the church every Sunday, taking his daughter to the luna park, summer vacations and Christmasses and the New Year’s Eve banquet with his wife. He doesn’t just remember it, he feels it as if those memories were his own. He talks about his family with a softness only a good father could carry in him.

It’s not Cas and it dawns on Dean that no matter how much he tries, he can’t make him abandon that conviction. It’s as true to him as loving Cas is for Dean. It’s not Cas and he never will be. Dean could hold him here a prisoner for years and it wouldn’t change a thing.

Jimmy catches Dean staring at his hand and stops the movement, lays his hand on his knees. All he wants is to go home and be himself again. He wants to start his life anew, free, at last, his own body—even if not really his own mind.

Dean has no right to take that away from him, no matter how much his heart aches. He can’t erase the man, his memories, his personality, just because he doesn’t like him this way.

He’s gonna have to let him go.

_ So, this is it, _ Dean thinks, watching Cas’s—Jimmy’s—back as he climbs the stairs. There’s a duffel bag on his shoulder, an old one, patched up to the limit. It’s hardly packed, he’s only got a few brand new t-shirts, a spare pair of jeans and a few hundred bucks to his soul.

Sam even let him take his hoodie. Dean couldn’t bear the thought of Jimmy taking any of Cas’s clothes, even if Dean’ll only end up throwing them away.

Sam bought him a ticket to California. It was Jimmy’s choice. He said it was so that he’s not tempted to drive to Pontiac, to try to find Amelia and Claire. He’s a decent guy like this. It took him a while to accept, when they explained to him, day after day, that he’s not really Jimmy. So he’d never be the person Claire and Amelia thought he was.

Staying in the bunker was never a question. He’d never want to live with the people who ruined his life. And Dean wouldn’t be able to live with someone who stole Cas’s body and mind.

The irony wouldn’t be lost on Cas if he could be here. The man who wore someone else’s body for all those years, now having that body reclaimed in the most freakish way.

So Jimmy leaves. He said, he’ll reinvent himself, like it’s some fucking Eat, Pray, Love. He isn’t Cas, he isn’t Jimmy—he’ll be a whole new person with a whole new life.

The thud of the door shakes Dean’s whole body. This is how he lost the love of his life. That’s it.

“Hello, Dean,” Cas says from the screen of Dean’s laptop. It’s only been seven days since Dean last saw his face. Since the day that the whole new Cas—Jimmy, whoever—left the bunker for good. Dean couldn’t stand a second longer. For when he misses Cas too much. God, Dean can’t imagine missing him a sliver more without completely collapsing onto himself.

“So, I know that we said our goodbyes. This is not why I am recording this. If the plan worked, I’m there, somewhere, near you.”

Dean’s jaw clenches so hard his teeth might start cracking any moment.

_ But it didn’t fucking work, Cas. You’re not here. I lost you in every way possible. _

“But I’m not me,” Cas keeps talking, “not yet. And I might not be a person who loves you for a long time.”

Dean slams the pause key. He can’t handle this. He was promised that the recording will make him feel better on his darkest night. And it’s tonight but it doesn’t feel any better. It never will.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

He knows it, but the Cas on the recording could never suspect that. Or else this would be the moment to tell him. It would be the moment to explain and say I’m sorry for this fucking joke of a plot twist that the universe pulled on both of them.

He doesn’t want to hear what more Cas has to tell him, since it doesn’t matter. But he can’t help it; they’re the last words he’ll ever hear from Cas and he has to hear it.

He presses play. The softest, most broken smile appears on Cas’s face.

“So I thought, until then, I want you to be able to hear it, from me. Even if it’s nothing but a recording. I want you to play this whenever you need it. I want to be there for you, even in this small way.”

Cas pauses, gearing himself up for his last words. There’s nothing Dean can do to prepare himself, he just lets them come.

“I love you, Dean. I love you more than the sum of all of my father’s creation. More than I ever thought was possible to love. You’re the best thing that has ever happened to me and don’t you ever dare for a second think any of this was your fault. That I would choose differently.”

It’s too much. Dean can’t hold back the tears streaming down his face. Can’t stop his hand from reaching out to Cas, touching the cold screen as if he could touch Cas’s face through it.

“Please, please, be patient with me because I know that love’s already in me. And I can’t wait to tell you about it in person, again.”

And with that, the video’s over. The last frame, one last look at Cas’s face frozen forever and Dean can barely see it with his vision blurred. From now on Cas is gonna be nothing more than an echo, there for Dean to play when he needs to hear it.

Dean wipes his tears into his sleeve, until he can see clearly again.

He presses replay.

“Hello, Dean.”

**Author's Note:**

> Kudos and comments always very much appreciated!


End file.
